A History Of English Literature Vol. 3 Ed.1st

A Hfstorq of

ENGLISH LITERATURE

(In Questions & Answers)

¥•1 m

BY

J. N, Mundra. u. a.
d:

S. C. Mundra. m. a.

Deptt. of EngiUh
SAKEtLLY COLLEGE. BAEEILL^

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FOREWORD

Histocy- writing in geoeui has seldom been encootaged by
Clitics. John Wolcot advised Sylvanus Urban ( E. Cave ), the
founder of ‘Gentleman’s Magazine’, in the following memorable
words :

Deal not in history, often have t said ;

’Twill prove a most unprofitable trade.

Whether Sri J.N. Mundra’s ‘A History of English Literature’
(in Questions and Answers) will prove a profitable trade or not
is yet too early to prophesy, but one thing is certain that Sri
Mtindra has done greater service to the students of English
Literature than to himself by disregarding Wolcot's advice, and
writing a kind of history which is full but not exuberant, precise
but not pedantic and short but not skeletal. The form of questions
and answers has been used throughout the book in order to
provide a conveniently arranged data for the consumption of
those students who fail in the University examinations on the
store of irrelevancy. Sri Mundra makes catechism easy and
unobtrusive and saves himself from the besetting sins of ‘Longer
and Shorter Catechists.’

None but a charlatan will pretend that a history of the kind
which Sri Mundra has written is thoroughly original. Sri Mundra
acknowledges his indebtedness to all standard Histories of
English Literature and to eminent Historians and Critics. The
chief value of Sri Mundra’s work lies not so much in the matter
as in the manner. It never absents itself from felicity and
perspicacity. '

A seasoned teacher of English Literature in the postgraduate
department of English studies at Bareilly College, Sri Mundra is
not only gifted with a sense of proportion and balance but also
with an unerring instinct for sifting the data at his disposal. He
ministers to the advanced studenis of English Literature, like a
skilled physician, neither an ‘Overdose’ nor an ‘Underdose,’ and
yet allows him widely to taste the rich flavours of English
Literature from the 14th century down, to the present day.

I have had occasions of watching the literacy progress of
Szi Mundxa at close quattets, both as my student and (now) my
colleague in the Department of English, and I can confidently say
that he must have *8cocned delights’ and lived ‘laborious days’
in order to produce a historical account of English Literature in
questions and answers, so accurate in detail, perspicuous in style
and discriminating in its critical judgments. 1 hope Sri Mundra’s
book will get about, and contrary to the ominious prediction of
Wolcot for such kinds of> literary writings, it will prove to be
most profitable at least to those fox whom it is intended, if not
to the pockets of the writer.

R. A. MISRA, M.A., Ph. D.

Head of the Department of English,
Bareilly College, Bareilly.

CONTENTS

Victorian Literature.

No. Page.

Poetry and Drama.

1. Social, Political, Economic and Religious Tendencies

of the Victorian Age 1

2. Literary Tendencies of the Victorian Age 7

3. Prominent Early Victorian Poets 11

4. Poetical and Dramatic Works of Alfred Tennyson 12

*5. Tennyson as the Representative Poet of His Age 18

Tennyson as a Thinker 24

7. Tennyson as an Artist 33

"S. Tennyson as a Lyric Poet 41

9. Poetical and Dramatic Works of Robert Browning 43

10. Browning as a Poet of Love 48

11. Browning’s Philosophy of Life 51

12. Browning as a Writer of Dramatic Monologue 57

13. Browning’s Obscurity 61

14. Elizabeth Barrett Browning as a Poetess 64

[5. Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold 66

[6. Some Important Poems of M. Arnold 68

.7. Main Characteristics of Arnold’s Poetry 72

18. Matthew Arnold’s Nature Poetry 86

L9. Pessimistic Poets of the Victorian Age ^

(a) Arthur Clough 91

(b) James Thomson 93

(c) Edward Fitz-Gerald 94

!0. Pre-Raphaelite Poetry 95

11. Poetical Works of Dante Gasbriel Rossetti 104

11. D. G* Rossetti as a Poet af the Pre-Raphaelite

School 105

23* The Poetry of Christina Rossetti 109

( 2 )

Page.

24. ; Poetical Wotks of Willisiin Mottis 112

25. William Mortis as a P«e-Rapba«lite Poet 114

^26. Poetical Works of A. C. Swinburne 117

27. Main Characteristics of A. C. Swinburne’s Poettf 121

28. Contribution to Victorian Poetry by the following
Poets :

(a) Coventry Patmore 128

. (b) Francis Thompson 130

(c) George Meredith 130

(d) Thomas Hardy 131

29. Writers of Light Verse and Parody in the Victorian

Age 134

30. Main Trends and Features of the Victorian Poetry 135

“rose.

31. Main Works of ThomasXarlyle 139

32. ' Thomas Carlyle as a Literary Artist 144

33. Thomas Carlyle as a Literary Critic and a Prophet

of His Age 147

34. Thomas Carlyle as a Political Thinker and a

Historian 149

35. Main Works of John Ruskin 150

36. John Raskin as a Critic of Act and Literature 156

37. John Raskin as a Literary Artist and His Prose

Style 159

38. John Raskin as a Social Reformer and a Critic of

'the Societ y ~ "" 161

39. Thomas Babington Macaalay as an Essayist and a

Historian 166

to. Newman and the Oxford Movement 172

fl. Matthew Arnold as a Critic and a Prose- Writer 175

42. Walter Horatio Pater as a Critic and Prose- Writer 188

43. Difference between Walter Pater and M. Arnold 195

44. The Aesthetic Movemrat of the Victorian Age :

(a) John Addington Symonds (b) Oscar Wilde 197

45. Robert Louis Stevenson as an Essayist 200

( 3 )

Page.

46- Main Works of : —

(i) Historians

(a) James Anthony Fioudc (b) Alexander William

Kinglake 20 i

(c) John Richard Green. (d) Edward Augustus

Freeman, (e) William Hickling Prescott Z03

(ii) Biographers

(a) Mrs. Gaskell, (b) Mrs. Oliphant,

(c) John Forster, (d) Trevelyan etc. 204

(iii) Scientists

(a) Charles Robert Darwin (b) Herbert Spencer,

(c) Thomas Henry Huxley 205

(iv) Philosophers

(a) John Stuart Mill, (b) \lexandcr Bain, (c) Henry
Sidgwick, (d) James Martineau, (e) Edward
Caitd 206

Novel

47. Main Features of the Early Victorian Novel and

Novelists 207

'48. Benjamin Disraeli as a Novelist and His Works 209

49. Bulwer Lytton as a Novelist 212

50. Main Novels of Charles Dickens 214

51. Chacles Dickens as a Novelist 223

"52. Dickens’s Art of Plot Construction 224

53. Dickens’s Realism, Plastic Imagination and Morality 226

54. Dickens as a Social Reformer 228

55. Dickens as a Humorist 231

Dickens’s Pathos 233

Relation between Dickens’s Humour and Pathos 235

'^8. Dickens’s Art of Characterisation 239

*59. Dickens’s Descriptive Power and Style 245

60. Dickens as a Representative Victorian Novelist 1

Features of Victorian Novel in Dickens’s work j 246

%1. Principal Novels of W. M. Thackeray 250

63. W. M. Thackeray as a Novelist 254

64. Followers of Dickens and Thackeray :

(a) Charles Kingley 262

( 4 »

(b) Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell

Page.

264

(c) Charles Reade

266

(d) George Borrow

267

(e) R. O. Blackmore

268

(£) W. W. Collins

269

(g) Anthony Trollope

27 e

55.

Charlotte Bronte

272

^6.

Emily Bronte

278

57.

Anne Bronte

282

58.

Contribution by the Bronte Sisters to th

ic English Novel 283

59.

Main Novels of George Eliot

285

70.

George Eliot as a Novelist

291

71.

Main Novels of George Meredith

296

72.

George Meredith as a Novelist

301

73.

A Comparison and Contrast between

George Eliot

and George Meredith

305

74.

Main Novels of Thomas Hardy

306

75.

Thomas Hardy as a Novelist

312

20tli Ceotury Literature

^ovel

76. Social, Political, Economic and Literary Tendencies

of the 20th Century or the Age of Interrogation 330

77- Main Tendencies of the Modern English Novel 334

78. Henry James 344

79. Contribution to Realism in Modern Fiction by

George Moore and George Gissing 348

80. James Matthew Barrie 350

31. Samuel Butler 352

82. Rudyard Kipling 355

83. Arnold ’Bennett 357

84. John Galsworthy 361

85. Main Works of H G. Wells 366

86. H. G. Wells as a Novelist and a Thinker 370

,87. Joseph Conrad 373

88. D. H. Lawrence 377

89. Contribution to the Modern Novel by ; , 380

( 5 )

I Page.

(a) J> Priestley, (b) Prank Swinner^ton, (c) Hugk
Walpole

90. Somerset Maugham 381

Aldous Huxley 385

E. M. Forster k* 387

93. James Joyce r r. 393

94. Women Novelists of the 20th Century :

(a) Henry Handel Richardson, (b) Dorothy Richardson,

(c) Miss Humphrey Ward, (d) Sarah Grand 396

(e) Rose Macaulay 397

(f) Mrs. Clifford (g) Katherine Mansfield 398

(h) Virginia Woolf 399

95. Development of the Novel from 1939 to 1966 403

(a) Graham Greene 404

(b) Joyce Cary, (c) Evelyn Waugh 405

(d) C, P. Snow 406

(e) George Orwell 407

(f) Elizabeth Bowen 408

. (g) Ivy Compton Burnett 409

(h) Lawrence Durrell, (i) Angus Wilson 410

(j) V. S. Pritchett, (k) Anthony West, (1) Henry Green 411
(m) Christopher Isherwood, (n) Robert Graves,

(o) Rex Warner 412

^rose

96. The English Essay and Essayists during the 20th Ccatury —

(a) G. K. Chesterton 414

(b) Hilaire Belloc 416

(c) E. V. Lucas 417

(d) Robert Lynd 418

(c) A. G. Gardiner 420

(f) Max Beerbohm 423

(g) J. B* Priestley 424

(h) E. V..Knox 425

(i) A. A. Milne, (j) Alice Meyncli, (k) Dean Inge 426

(1) Charles Morgan, (m) Rebecca West,

{tt) Ernest Hemingway, (o) E. E. Cummings

(p) G, E. Montague 426

( 6 )

(q) Edmund Blunden, (t) Maurice Baring,

(s) Aldous Huxley 429

97. Twentieth Century Biography and Autobiography :

(a) Lytton Strachey 430

(b) Philip Guedalla 43P

(c) Sir Osbert Sitwell and Others 432

98. Literature of Travel :

(a) T. E. Lawrence 433

(b) H, M. Tomilson 434

(c) Sacheverall Sitwell, (d) Hilaire Belloc 435

(e) Cunninghame Graham 436

99. Prominent Writers of Nature and Country Life :

(a) William Henry Hudson 437

(b) Henry Williamson 440

100. Historical Prose :

(a) Arthur Bryant, (b) G. M. Trevelyan (c) G. G.

Coulton 440

(d) A. L, Rowse, (e) H. A, Fisher, (£) H. Butler Field,

(g) Deins Brogan, (h) R. H. Tawney, (i) Barbara
Hammod, (j) H, G. Wells (k) Winston Churchill,

(1) Sir James Frazer, (m) A. J. Toynbee 441

101. Scientific and Philosophical Literature by :

(a) A. N. Whitehead, (b) Sir James jeans, (c) S. A.

Eddington, (d) Julian Huxley 442

(e) J. B. S. Haldane, (f) Lancelot Hogben,

(g) Bertrand Russel 443

102. Literary Critics :

(a) Arthur Symons 445

(b) A. C. Bradley, (c) Sir Walter Raleigh 446

(d) W. P. Ker, (e) George Saintsbury 447

(f) G. K. Chesterton, (g) Sir A. Quillet Couch

(h) Sir E. Gosse, (i) J. M. Murry 448

(j) Sacheverall Sitwell (k) Lascelles Abercrombie,

(1) Oliver Elton, (m) Herbert Grierson, (n) R. W.
Chambers, (o) B. K. Chambers, (p) G. B. Harrison,

(q) John Palmer, (r) Wilson Knight, (s) H. B.

Charlton, (t) Professor Dover Wilson, (u) Moulton 449

( 7 )

Page.

(v) Tillyaid, (w) Six Maurice Bowra, (x) Basil Willey

(y) Lord David Cecil, (z) C. K. Ogden etc. 450

103. Modeco Short Stocy and its Writers 455

(a) Tolstoy (b) Maupassant (c) O’Henry (d) R. L.

Stevenson (e) Rudyard Kipling (f) Oscar. Wilde

(g) H. G. Wells 456

(b) A. E. Coppard (i) Katherine Mansfield 457

(j) Galsworthy, (k) Scan O’ Flaherty (1) Anderson 458

(m) Earnest Hemingway (n) Lawrence

\ ^ g w ^ \ if

(o) J. Conrad (p) Forster (q) H. E. Bates (t) Miss
Elizabeth Bowen

(s) Dr. Mulk Raj Anand, R. K. Narayan,B. Bhattacharya,

K. A. Abbas & Ruskin Bond 460

Drama.

104 Factors for the emergence of Drama during the
^ 20th Century 461

105. Main Characteristics of the 20th Century Drama 462

106. Henry Arthur Jones and A. W. pinero as Pioneers

^ of the New Drama 467.

107. Main Dramatic Works of John Galsworthy 469

foS. John Galsworthy as a Dramatist 473

109. Galsworthy’s Conception of Tragedy and Irony 484.

110. Galsworthy has no Heroes and Villains 487

111- Difference between Galsworthy’s and Shaw’s Charac-

terisation 490.

112. Main Plays of Bernard Shaw 494

113. Bernard Shaw as a Dramatist 501

114. Granville Barker as a Dramatist and a Comparison

with Galsworthy as Realists 511

115. John Masefield as a dramatist 514

116. Sic James Barrie 515

117. Sir William Gilbert 517

L18. Revival of the Comedy of Manners and its Prominent

^^iters : 517

i/(a) Bernard Shaw, (b) Oscar Wilde, 518

(c) Noel Coward (d) Somerset Maugham 519

(e) Sutro (f) James Bridie (g) Fredrick Lonsdale 520

< 8 )

Page.

119. Irish Literary Theatre or The Abbey Theatre is

Dublia acd Irish Dramatists : 521

W. B. Yeats 522

(b) Lady Gregory (c) J. M. Synge 523

(d) Leitnox Robinson (e) T. C. Murray (f) Padric

Column 524

(g) Edward Martyn (h) Lord Duusany 525

(i) O’ Casey 326

L20. Provincial Repertory Theatre and the Manchester

School Dramatists 527

(a) Granville Barker, (b) Stanley Houghton,

(c) St. John Hankin 529

(d) St. John Ervine (e) Allan Monkhouse 530

121. The Historical Drama and its Chief Dramatists 53 j

(a) John Drinkwater

(b) Clilford Bax (c) Ashley Duke 532

(d) Rudolf Besier, (c) Shan Leslie, (£) Miss John

Temple, (g) Conal O Riordan; (h) Edward
Thomson ^i) Howard Pcacey (j) G. D. Gribbc

(j) Stutton Vane (k) Laurence Housman 533

(22. Tbc poetic Drama and Dramatists of the 20th

Century : 534

(a) Stephen Phillips (b) Oscai Wilde 535

(c) Davidson (d) James Elroy Flecker

(e) Dr. Gordon Bottomley, 536

(f) John Masefield, (g) L. Binyon (h) John

Drinkwater 537

(i) T. S. Eliot 539

(j) Stephen Spender 543

(k) Scan O’ Casey (1 ) Christopher Fry 544

123. Expressionism in {Modern Drama and the Dramatists

of the ^Expressionistic School' 546

(a) Scan O’ Casey 547

(b) C. K. Munro, (c) Reginald Berkeley 548

(d) H. F. Rubinstein, (c) J, B. Priestley

(t) Blmet Rice 549

(g) Eugene O* Neill 550

( 9 )

Page.

124. Development of Dcama from 1939 to 1963 550

Poetry.

^25. Main Tendencies in Modern^ ^lisJjLPaetXY 554

126. English Poetry of the Nineties and the Poets belonging

to this Period : 559

The Decadents : — 559

(a) Ernest Dowson, (b) Lionel Johnson,

(c) Arthur Symons (d) Stephen Phillips,

(e) Oscar Wilde, (f Addington Symonds
(ii) The Realists :

(a) Wilfred Blunt 560

(b) William Ernest Henley (c) Rudyard Kipling, 561

(ill) The Pessimists :

(a) Thomas Hardy 564

(b) A. E. Housman 567

(iv) Transit ional Poets :

(a) Robert Jt5rT3gcs 569

(b) Gerald Manley Hopkins 573

(c ) William Butler Yea ts 574

(d) Gordon Bottomlcy 576

(e) William Watson (f) Francis Thompson 577

127. Georgian Poetry and Georgian Poets : 577

(a) John Masefield 579

(b) Walter De La Mare 582

(c) Edmund Blunden, (d) Lascclles Abercombic

(e) James Elroy Flecker 584

(f) Ralph Hodgson 585

(g) W. W. Gibson 586

(h) W. H. Davies 587

(i) Edward Thomas 5S9

(j) John Drinkwater, (k) Alfred Noyes 590

(1) Harold Monro (m) G. K. Chesterton 591

(n) Hilaire Belloc 593

128. Imagists as a Reaction to Georgians 593

129. The Poetry of the Great War and the Soldier Poets 595

(a) Kipling (b) John Freeman, (c) Lawrence Binyon 595

(d) Rupert Brooke 596

( 10 )

Page.

(e) Siegfried Sassoon 597

(f) Robert Graves (g) Robert Nicholas

(g) Wilrcd Owen 598

(h) Julian Grenfell (i) Edmund Blunden 599

130. English Poetry between (1920 — 30) and the Prominent

Poets of this Period : — 600

(a) T. S, Eliot 601

(b) Edith Sitwell 606

(c) Osbcrt Sitwell, (d) Sacheverell Sitwell 608

(e) Victorian Sackville West, (f) Richard Church 609

(g) Herbert Read (h) Humbert Wolfe

(i) Roy Compbell 6-10

131. Poetic Trends between (1930 — 40) and Prominent Poets

of this Period 611

(a) W. H. Auden 612

(b) Christopher Isherwood (n) Stephen Spender 614

(d) Cecil Day Lewis 615

(e) Louis Macneice 617

132. Poetic Trends between (1940 —66) and the Prominent

Poets of this Period 618

(a) Dylan Thomas 620

(b) Charlotte Mew Mary Webb, Sylvia Lynd, Rose
Macaulay, Frances Cornford, H. D. and Dorothy
Wcllcsely. .622

VICTORIAN LITERATURE

(1I3MM*)

Q. 1 Give a brief accoont of the social, political, economic and
religious tendencies of the Victorian Age.

Ans- The Victorian age is one of the most temackable
periods in the history of England. It was an eta of material
affluence, political consciousness, democratic reforms, industrial
and mechanical progress, scientific advancement, social unrest,
educational expansion, empire building and religious uncertainty.
There were a number of thinkers who were well satisfied with the
progress made by the Victorians, while from a whole class Of
adverse critics could be heard a scathing criticism of the values
held dear by the Victorians. While Macaulay trumpeted the
progress that the Victorians had achieved, Ruskin and Garlyl^
Lytton Stracbey and Trollope raised frowns of disfavour agabitt
the soul-killing materialism of the age. Carlyle himself, a hostile
critic of the age, admired L. H. Myer’s reference to *the deep-,
iAted spiritual vulgarity that lies at the heart of our civilization.’
Symonds detected in the Victorian period, whatever may be iu
buoyancy and promise, elements of *wotld fatigue’, which were
quite alien to the Elizabethan age, with which the Victorian eta
is often compared. Whatever may be the defects of the Victorian
way of life, it cannot be denied that it was in many ways a
glorious epoch in the history of English literature, and the
advancement made in the field of poetry, prose, and fiction was
really commendable.

The Victorian age was essentially a period of peace and
prosperity fox England. The few colonial wars that broke out
during this period exercised little adverse effect on the national
life. The Crimean war, of course, caused a stir in England, but
it9 effects were soon forgotten and the people regained the normal
tenor Of their lives without feeling the aftermath of war in their
round of daily activities. In the earlier years of the age, the
effect of the French Revolution was still felt, but by the middle
of the century, it had almost eompletely dwindled and En^nd
4elt safe from any revolutionary upsurge disturbing the placidity

( 2 )

and peaceful existence of its live. On the whole, **it was a
comparatively peaceful reign 'w^en Englishmen, secure in their
island base, could complete the transformation of all aspects
of their industrial, commercial arid social life without any risks
of violent interruptions that gave quite a different quality to the
history of continental nations.’’ It wsls an era when the *war
drum throbb’d no longer’, and the people felt safe and secure in
their island homes.

Peace brought material advancement and industrial progress
in the country. The Industrial Revolution of the age transformed
the agrarian economy of England to an industrial economy;
Mills and factories were established at important centres, and
the whole of England hummed with the rattle of* looms and the
boom of weaving machines.

• ' Industrial advancement created social unrest ^ and economic
distress among the masses. The Industrial Revolution while
creating the privileged class of capitalists and millowners, rolling
in wealth and riches, also brought in its wake the semi-starved
and ill-clad class of labourers arid factory workers who wete
thoroughly dissatisfied with their miserable lot. ' National wealtja
was increased but it was not equitably distributed. class of

landed aristocracy and millowners sprang up who lopSsd with eyes
of disdain and withering contempt on the lot of the ragged and
miserable factory hands. Conditions of life held no charm for
labourers and workers in the field; for they were required to dwell
in slum areas with no amenities of life attending them at any stag*,
of their miserable existence. There were scenes of horrid despair
witnessed in the lives of the poor. With the whirl gig of
time a wave of social unrest swept over Enghnd, and the ulcers of
this apparently opulent society were brought to the surface by
writers like Dickens, Raskin, and Carlyle. **The deplorable state
of the debtor’s Prison, the Fleet, and the Marshalsea; the dismal
abysses* of elementary education; the sorry type of nurses available
in sickness; the oppression of little children/ the prevalence of
religious hypocrisy-— these and many other dark comers in the life
of England were illuminated by the searchlight of Dickens’
genius/*

The woeful and deplorable conditions of labourers, miners.

( 3 )

debtors, piisoaers, soon caught the eyes of social reformers, and
a stage was prepared for ameliorating the lot of the down-trodden
and under dogs of an affluent society. The Victorian era, there-
fore, witnessed vigorous so<^ial reforms and a line of crusading
humanitarian reformers who sought to do away with the festering
sores and seething maladies of the Victorian age. The Victorian
age is, therefore, an age of humanitarian considerations and
social uplift for the masses.

In the course of the Victorian era there developed consci-
ously amongst the increasingly large number of literary men and
women and philanthropic social reformers a humanist attitude to
life which was not a matter of creed and dogmas, but a recogni-
tion of the love and loyalty that the better-sensed people had for
their unfortunate brethren. In the works of Charles Dickens,
Mrs. Gaskcll, Carlyle and Ruskin, we notice the crusading
zeal of the literary artists to bring about salutary reforms in the
social and economic life of the country.

The growing importance of the massed and the large number
of factory hands gave a spurt to Reform Bills, which heralded
the birth of democratic consciousness among the Victorian people.
The Victorian age witnessed a conflict between aristocracy and
plutocracy, on the one hand, and democracy and socialism on the
other side. The advance in the direction of democracy was well
marked out, and inspite of the protestations of Tennyson and
Carlyle, its sweeping tide could not be stemmed. ^The long
struggle of the Anglo-Saxons for personal liberty is definitely
settled, and democracy becomes the established order o£
the day. * The king and the peers are both stripped of their
power and left as figure-heads of a past civilization. The last
vestige of personal government and the divine right of rulers
disappears; the House of Commons becomes the ruling power in
England and a series of new reform bills rapidly extend the suffrage
until the whole , body of English people choose for themselves
the men who shall represent them.’’

England witnessed expansion in the field of education.
The passing of the Education Acts was a landmark in the* history
of education in the country. A large reading public was prepared
to welcome the outpourings, of novelists, poets aiid social reformers.

( 4 )

‘]p:^e psess alw came ioto its own and became a potent force in
awakening political consciousness among the people of this age.

There was a phenomenal growth in population during the
Victorian age. The population of Great Britain at the time of
the first census in 1801 was about ten and a half millions. By 1901
it had gsqwn to thirty seven millions. Mote and more of territorial
expansion was needed fox the habitation of this growing popula-
tion and England during this age launched on the course of empire
building and establishing its hegemony in countries where the
light of civiliaation had not yet advanced.

There was an unprecedented intellectual and scientific
advancement during the Victorian age. It was a period of inte-
llectual ferment, and scientific thinking. Science, once a sealed
book save to an elect few, was democratised, and mote and more
scientific enthusiasts dedicated themselves to the popularisation
of scientific works like Darwin’s Origin of Species- The mao of
science was regarded no more an academic recluse, but as a social
figure exercising a deep and profound influence on the social and
educational life of the age.

Inspite of the advance of science and scientific discoveries
the general tenor of life was still governed by religious and moral
considerations. The Victorians were moralists at heart, and
religion was the sheet anchor of their lives. There was a marked
conflict between religion and science, between moralists and
scimitists, each out doing the other in their orthodoxy, but the
current of religious thought was not chilled. It was an age in
which prime ministers raised echoes of a submerged religious
vocabnlaty in their speeches and novels. The Oxford Movement
represents the ^revival of the old Roman Catholic religion and the
authority of the church at a time when science was challenging the
reli^ous thoughi of the age.

In domestic life the Victorians upheld the authority of
patents over children. In the Barrets of tVimpole Street we have a
vivid pietuxe of parental authority and the subjugation of children
to the will of the head of the family. Emphasis was laid on autho-
rity and reverence for ^e dders. Women were relegated to a lower
f toeu r They were expected to cultivate domestic virtnesk rear up

( 5 >

children and look after the home and the hearth. Women were
regarded inferior to men and Mrs. Ellis in The Women of England
outlined the role of the female sex as being of service to the male
members of the family. ‘*The first thing of importance” she said,
“was to be inferior to men, inferior in mental power in the same
proportion that you are inferior in strength.” Education was a
closed book for most of the women, and the idea of establishing
women’s colleges was ridiculed by the national poet Tennyson
in The Princess.

Victorians Ifiid emphasis on order, decorum and decency.
To talk of duty, honour,, the obligation of being a gentleman, the
responsibilities of matrimony, and the sacredness of religious
belief was to be Victorian. “The Victorians,” we are told, “were
a poor, blind, complacent people”; yet they were torn by doubt,
spiritually bewildered, lost in a troubled universe. They were crass
materialists, wholly absorbed in the present, quite unconcerned
“with .abstract verities and eternal values”; but they were also
excessively religious, lamentably idealistic, nostalgic for the past,
and ready to forego present delights for a vision of a world
beyond despite their slavish “conformity,” their purblind respect
for convention, they were, we learn, “rugged individualists,”
given to “doing as one likes”, heedless of culture, careless of a
great tradition; they were iconoclasts who worshipped the idols
of authority. They were, besides, at once sentimental humanita-
rians and hard-boiled proponents of free enterprize. Politically,
they were governed by narrow insular prejudice, but swayed by
dark imperialistic designs. Intellectually and emotionally, they
believed in progress, denied original sin, and affirmed the death
of the Devil; yet by temperament they were patently Manichaeans
to whom living was a desperate straggle between the force of good
and the power of darkness. While they professed “manliness”,
they yielded to feminine standards; if they emancipated woman
from age-old l^dage, they also robbed her of a vital place in
society. Though they were sexually inhibited and even failed to
consider the existence of physical love, they begot incredibly large
families and flaunted in their verse a morbidly over-developed
erotic sensibility. Their art constitutes a shameless record of both
hypocrisy and ingenuousness. And their literatuie remains to3

( 6 .)

purposeful, propagandistic, didactivc, aesthetic, with too palpable,
a design upon the reader; yet it is clea;fly so romantic, aesthetic,
^escapist’, that it carries to posterity but, a tale of little meaning/’^
"Whatever we may say of Europe between Waterloo and Sedan”,
wrote John Morley " in our country at least it was an epoch of
hearts lifted with hope, and brains active with sober and manly
reason for the common good. Some ages arc marked as senti-
mental, others stand conspicuous as rational. The Victorian age
was happier than most in the flow of both these currents into a
common stream of vigorous and effective talent. New truths
were welcomed, in free minds and free minds make brave men.”

Our study of Victorian background will not be complete
without adding a few lines about the Victorian Compromise. The
Victorians sought a happy compromise when they were faced with
radical problems. They were not willing to be dominated by one
ejsctreme viewpoint, and in. a welter of confusing issues they struck
out a pleasing compromise. Victorian Compromise was particu-
larly perceptible in three branches of life. In the field of political
life, there was a compromise between democracy and aristocracy.
While accepting the claims of the rising masses to political
equaUty, they defended the rights of aristocarcy. While reposing
their faith in progress in the political sphere, they were not ready
for revolutionary upsurges disturbing the settled order of life.
Progressive ideals were reconciled with conservative leanings for
an established order of society. In the Held of religion and
science, a satisfying compromise, was affected. The advances made
by new science were accepted, but the claims of old religion were
not ignored. Victorians took up a compromising position between
faith of religion and doubt created by science:

There remains more faith in honest doubt

Believe me than in half the creeds.

"They desired to be assured that all was for the best; they
desired to discover some comprotnise which, while not outraging
their intellect and their reason, would none the less soothe their
conscience and restore their fait^,'if not completelj^, at least sufficl-
Mtly to aUpw them to believe in some ultimate purpose and more

after death. In voicing these doubts^

f ; i f . .

( 7 )

in phrasing the inevitable compromise Tennyson found;,' and
eadeivourei pasionately to fulfil his appointed mission.

In the field of sex, 'the Victorians had their compromise.
The sex problem \Kras the most blatant and persistent. In this field
their object was to discover “some middle course between the
unbridled licentiousness of previous ages and the complete negation
of the functions and purposes of nature.” The Victorians permitted
indulgence in sex but restricted its sphere to conjugal feli^iiy
End happy married life. They disfavoured physical passion and
illegal gratification of sex impulse, l^hcy could not contemplate
the possibility of any relation between man and woman other than
the conjugal. In Tennyson’s Lady of Shallot we are introduced to
^two young lovers’ walking together itl the moonlight^ but we are
at once reassured by the statement that these two lovers were ‘lately
wed.’ The Victorian ideal was to achieve ‘wedded bliss’ rather than
satisfaction of the sex Urge by illegal and unauthorised methods.

Q 2. What are the prominent literary tendencies of the Victo-
rian Age ?

Ans. The Victorian age was one of the most remarkable
periods in the history of English Literature. It witnessed the
flowering of poetry in the hands of a host of poets, great and
small. It m irked the growth of the English novel, and laid the
foundation of English prose on a surer footing.

The note of individuality was the hall mark of Victorian
literature. The literary figures of the Victorian age were endowed
with marked originality in outlook, character and style. “In
Macaulay there was much of the energy and enterprise of thd
self-made man. Tennyson loved to sing the praises of sturdy
independence. In Piqkens’ books there are, perhaps, more origi-
nals than in those of any other novelist in the world. The Bronte
sisters pursued their lonely path in life with the pride and endurance
learnt at the Haworth parsonage. Carlyle and Browning cultivated
manner full pi eccentricity; and even Thackeray, though more
regular in style than his contemporaries, loved to follow^ a hapha-
xard path in the conduct of his stories, indulging in iickb^ndcd

* Hamid Nich ilsoo: lennyson.

t 8 )

lienee of comment and digtession.”*

The Victorian age was essentially the age of prose and noyel.
"Though the age produced many poets, and two who deserve to
tank among the greatest” says Long, "nevertheless this is empha-
tically an age of prose and novel. The novel in this age dlls a
place which the drama held in the days of Elizabeth; and never
before, in any age, or language, has the novel ' appeared in such
numbers and in such perfection.”’l”l‘

Victorian literature in its varied aspects was marked by a
deep moral note. "The second marked characteristic of the age
is that literature, both in prose and poetry, seems to depart from
the purely artistic standard of art’s sake and to be actuated
by a definite moral purpose.”*** Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle,
Ruskin were primarily interested in their message to their country-
men. They were teachers of England and were inspired by a
conscious moral purpose to uplift and instruct their fellowmen.
Behind the fun and sentiment of Dickens, the social miniatures of
Thackeray, the psychological studies of George Eliot, lay hidden
a definite moral purpose to sweep away error and to bring out
vividly and in unmistakable terms the underlying truth of human
life.

The literature of the Victorian age was co-related to the
social and political life of the age. The Victorian literary artists,
leaving aside a few votaries of art for art’s sake represented by the
Pre-Raphaelite school of pueu, were inspired by a social zeal to
represent the problem of their own age. Perhaps for this reason
^he Victorian literature is the literature of realism rather than of
romance, not the realism of Zola and Ibsen, "but a deeper realism
which strives to tell the whole truth, showing moral and physical
diseases as they ate, but holding up health and hope as the moral
conditions of humanity.” Literature became an instrument of
social reform and social propaganda and was marked with pur-
poseful, propagandistic and didactic aims.

A few literary artists of this age struck the note of sevolt
against the materialistic tendencies of the age, and sought to seek

* B. Oiuom: a History of Eiielisb Lilcratura.

. •!>. W. J. Long: BogUsh Utstnliire.

|l6id.

( 9 )

refuge ia the overcharged atmosphere of the Middle Ages. An
escapist note is also perceptible in Victorian literature, and this is
particularly noticed in the works of Pre-Raphaelite poets. Rossetti
delved in the folklore and diablerie of the Middle Ages. Morris
busied himself in its 'legends and sagas. "There were some minor
reversions to classicism, but taken largely, literature of the age
continued to be romantic, in the novelty and variety of its form,
in its search after undiscovered springs of truth and beauty, in its
emotional and imaginative intensity.

The literature of the Victorian age inspite of its insistence
on rationality, and an order born out of reason, could not
completely cut off from the main springs of Romanticism. The
spirit of Romanticism continued to influence the innermost cons-
ciousness of the age. It affected the works of Tennyson,
Thackeray, Browning and Arnold. It permeated almost every
thought just as it colours almost every mode of expression. All
literary artists of the age were impregnated with it. Carlyle's thun-
dering denunciations were charged with the same emotional fire and
visionary colouring as that of Shelley and Byron. New vibrations
were added to the main chord of Romanticism. Between the years
1875 to 1880 the romantic inspiration was again in the ascendent.

A note of pessimism, doubt and despair runs through
Victorian literature and is noticed especially in the poetry of Matt-
hew Arnold and Arthur Hugh Clough. Though a note of
pessimism runs through the literature of the age, yet it cannot be
dubbed as a literature of bleak pessimism and dark despair. A
note of idealism and optimism is also struck by poets like
Browning and prose writers like Ruskin. Rabbi Ben Ezra brings
out the courageous optimism of the age. Stedman's Victorian
Anthology is, on the whole, a most inspiring book of poetry.
Great essayists like Macaulay, Carlyle, Ruskin, and great
novelists like Dickens, Thackeray and George Eliot inspire us with
their faith in humanity and uplift us by their buoyancy and
lange charity.

The literature of the age is considerably modified by the
impact of science. "It is the scientific spirit, and all that the

* Nfoody-loveit: a Histoiy of English Literature.

( 10 )

scientific spirit implied, its certain doubt, its^ care for minuteness
and truth of observation, its growing interest in social processes*
and the conditions under which life is lived that is the central fact
in Victorian literature.”*

The questioning spirit in Clough, the pessimism of James
Thomson, the melancholy of Matthew Arnold, the fatalism of
Fitssgerald, are all the outcome of the sceptical tendencies
evoked by scientific research. Tennyson’s poetry is also consi-
derably influenced by the advancement of science in the age and
the undertones of scientific researches can be heard in !n
Memoriam

"In fiction, the scientific spirit is no less discernible: the
problems of heredity and environment preoccupy the attention
of the novelist. The social problem of the earlier Victorians, of
Charlotte Bronte, Dickens, Kingsley and Reade give place to
points in biology, psychology, pathology. The influence of Herbert
Spencer and of Comte meets us in the pages of George Eliot;
while the analytical methods of science are even more subtly
followed in the fiction of George Eliot, the early writings of
Mrs. Humphry Ward, and the intimate Wessex studies of Thomas
Hardy.”**

A note of patriotism runs through Victorian literature.
Tennyson,* Dickens and Disraeli are inspired by a national pride
and a sense of greatness in their country’s superiority over other
nations. Tennyson strikes the patriotic note in the following lines:
It is the land that freemen till
That sober-suited freedom chose
A land of settled government,

A land of just and old renown.

Where freedom slowly broadens down
From precedent to precedents

In one direction the literature of the Victorian age achieved

a salient and momentous advance over the literature of the
Romantic Revival The poets of the Romantic Revjval were
interested in nature, in the past, and in a lesser degree in art, but
they were not intensively intcres ted in men and women. To

« Mair: Modem ogli sh Literature.

** Compton-EtickeU : A History of KngllsbLiteratuie.

( 11 )

Wordsworth the dalesmen of the lakes were a part of the scenery
they moved in. He treated human beings as natural objects and
divested them of the complexities and passions of life as it is lived.
The Victorian poets and novelists laid emphasis on men and
women and imparted to them the same warmth and glow which
the Romantic poets had given to nature. "The Victorian Age
extended to the complexities of human life the imaginative sensi-
bility which its predecessor had brought to bear on nature and
history. The Victorian poets and novelists added humanity to
nature and art as the subject matter of literature.”*

THE VICTORIAN POETS

Q. 3. Give a brief account of the prominent early Victorian poets
before Tennyson.

Ans. The prominent early Victorian poets before Tennyson
were Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-49) and John Clare (1793-
1864). Beddoes was a dramatist as well as a writer of short lyrics.
He had a love for the morbid ajspects of human life and his
imagery was derived from the Jacobean dramatists. He tried to
give the air of idealism to his poetry, but failed in the attempt.
He had none of Shelley’s buoyant idealism. For Beddoes, poetry
had above all to be haunting, and he made an effort to achieve
this quality in his poetry. He, however, failed in his attempt.

A simpler and purer inspiration is to be found in the poetry
of John Clare, the Northamptonshire peasant poet, who was
considered mad by his contemporaries. He was essentially a poet
of the countryside and presented rural scenes in a remarkable
manner. "The quiet intensity of his observation in bis descrip-
tions of rural scenes, and the skill with which he organizes detail,
combine to achieve a poetic utterance of remarkable power and
control.” His nature poetry was a little different from that of
William Wordsworth. Whereas Wordsworth was interested in
contemplation and mysticism, Clare imparted no mystic touch to
the sights and scenes of nature. He had genuine love for the
sights and scenes of nature and he presented them with a calm
lucidity that distils its down kind of meaning. He could move

Mair: Modern Engtisb Literature.

( 12 1

the reader by deploying simple objects and incidents in a remark-
ably eloquent manner. His diction bad touches of eighteenth and
nineteenth century poets. His poetry is Romantic in a sense, but
it is classical as well in its control and poise (Signs of Writer)
as can be seen from the following lines of the poem.

The cat runs races with her tail: The dog
Leaps o*er the orchard hedge and Knar Is the grass
The swine run round and grunt and play with straw
Snatching out hasty mouthfuls ft om the stack.

Q. 4. Critically examine Alfred Tennyson’s (1809-92) Poetical
and Dramatic works.

OR

* Tennyson owed much of his contemporary fame to the

variety of his work ” (Groom) Discuss.

Ans. Alfred Tennyson was undoubtedly one of the greatest
poets of the Victorian age. He dominated the Victorian scene for
a number of years in his life and was honoured with the high
office of the poet laureate. Tennyson began his poetic career at
quite an early age, and his early verses bear the stamp of Milton,
Keats and even Virgil in a marked degree, yet he also carved one
an independent line of his own. During the long span of his
career as a poet he essayed every kind of poetry — the song, the
idyll, the dramatic monologue, the dialect poem, the descriptive
or pageant poem, the ballad, the war-ode, the threnody, the epic
narrative and the drama. The extraordinary diversity of his work
is itself typical of the strongly marked eclecticism of his age.
He wrote on classical, romantic and modern subjects; on English
history and Celtic legend; on the deepest problems of philosophy
and religion, and the range of his method and style is scarcely less
remarkable than that of his matter. In the wonderful variety of
his verse he suggests all the qualities of England’s greatest poets.
The dreaminess of Spenser, the majesty of Milton, the natural
simplicity of Wordsworth, the fantasy of Blake and Coleridge,
the melody of Keats and Shelley, the narrative vigour of Scott
and Byron, are evident on the successfve pages 6i Tennyson’s

( 13 )

poetry. The only thing lacking is the dramatic power of the
Elizabethans.

The earliest collection of Tennyson’s poems was published
ill 1827, when he was seventeen years of age, in Poems by Two
Brothers. The poems of this period arc immature, but in some
of them there is the same excellence of metrical skill and descrip-
tive power which Tennyson later on developed in poems like
Lotos Eaters^ The body of Shallot and O Enone. In 1830 was
published the second volume of poems-- Poems Chiefly Lyrical.
The poet makes some advance in poetical skill and in pieces like
Isabel and Madeline we have faint glimpses of the pictorial effect
and the sumptuous imagery of his maturer work. His volume of
poems published in 1833 shows a steady advance in poetic form,
and some of the poems of this volume, e. g. The Lady of Shallot^
O Ertone, The Lotos Eaters, and The palace of Art are really master
pieces of poetic art and metrical skill. These poems can take
their stand with the greatest of English Poems. “The chief defect
of this early work” says Compton Rickett, “is a thinness of inspi-
ration. There is too much sugar, and too little flour in these
literary confections.”

In 1842 Tennyson produced two volumes of poetry contain-
ing some of the finest jewels of his poetic art such as Ulysses, and
Locksley Hall, These two volumes placed Tennyson on that
summit from which he was never dislodged in his life time. The
poems of this volume bring him out as a thinker and register his
progress as a metrical artist.

In 1847 Tennyson produced The Princess a Medley, It is
the first long and elaborate poem on the subject of women’s
education, and their claim to social and political equality with man.
Tennyson ridicules the very conception of woman’s equality with
mao and his aspiration for higher education. He scoffs at the *new
woman’ ideal and treats the whole subject in a jesting manner
hovering between jest and earnest. The tone of the poem is serio-
comic It is diffusive in character and} has no cogency in the
treatment of the subject. It has no close-knit plan and is, in fact,
a medley. To make it appealing to the readers Tennyson added a
few lyrics of haunting melody to the second edition of the poem
in 1850. The lyrics of the poems such as Tears^ Idle Tears^

( 14 )

Splendour Falls on Castle Walls arc exquisitely beautiful and are
the special attraction of The Princess, **lti these lyrics Tennyson
expressed his favourite elegiac theme in a variety of metres and
of contexts. The quietly singing lullaby, "Sweet and Low,” the
familiar modulation of heroic into melancholy in "The spendour
falls on Castle Walls”, the use of nature imagery to create a mood
of loss and nostalgia in the unrhymed stanzas of "Tears, Idle
Tears”, and the dissolving of passion in a glimmering world of
stars, sleeping flowers, and lake water that is suggested in "Now
sleeps the crimson petal” — these are some of the successful
experiments.”*

Three years later in 1850 Tennyson brought out the famous
Elegy In Memoriam^ written to mourn the death of Arthur Hallam,
Tennyson’s College friend, who had died at Vienna in 1833. It con-
sists of one hundred and thirty one lyrics, "short swallow flights of
song”, composed at intervals stretching over a long period.
It is the result of deep brooding over the problems of life
extending over a period of seventeen years. The note of grief is
deep and poignant in the early part of the elegy, but gradually the
personal pain merges into anxious speculation and the poet is lost
in solvin g the mystery of death and the ultimate destiny of man in
the universe. The poet marches triumphantly from the state of
despair, to a state of hope and optimism. Through states of doubt
and despair, and anguished question, the poem mounts in a region
of firm though saddened faith, and ends in a full hymnal music
breathing hope and fortitude of heart.

There is no coherence and logical unity in the poem, and at
certain places it becomes dull and monotonous. These defects can
be glossed over considering the wealth of literary allusions, philo-
sophical reflections on the problems of human life and the final
note of triumph in the immortality of the soul. The monotony
of the poem is also broken by the lyrical intensity of the stanxas,
and their poetic appeal, "/w Memoriam lives as poetry (as we
might expect) by its lyrics which distil personal mood. Many df
these can be taken out of their context and read as individual
poems. Nevertheless, though these are the finest sing e poems in

Dafid Daiches : A. Critical, of, ^ogflsli J^jlieratare IIX

( 15 )

the work In Memoriam when we read as a whole does impress and
even more by its cumulative revelation of such a large tract of a
man’s emotional life; it has an integrity as autobiography and
exceeds its integrity as poetry.”*

With the publication of In Memoriam, Tennyson’s status as
the poet of the age was assured. He was appointed Poet Laureate
in the year of its publication, though he was not raised to the
exalted rank of Lord Tennyson until 1883. In 1855 was published
Maud and other Poems. ^'Moud is a monodrama, a rapid and
feverish record, in a series of lyrics, of a love affair blasted by a
tragic accident. It is true that at the end tHe crushed hero rouses
himself to proclaim his patriotic determination to fight in the
Cremean war which he sees as a salutary stirring up of a slothful
materialist nation, but this jingoistic CodaJias nothing to do with
the monodrama as a whole. The speed and hothouse passion of
the lyrics in Maud are impressive inspite of the almost morbid
crowding of imagery.” The lyrics in Maud are marked with a
frenxy, and are coloured by heat and fever. The rhythms swing
and crash, and the natural images bring out the heavily scented
atmosphere which surrounds the hero and bis love.

In 1859, 1869, 1889 Tennyson brought out a series of
Idylls of the King which centre round the personality of King Arthur
and the knights of the Round Table. The subject had earlier
attracted the attention of Spenser and Milton; but they did not
celebrate the achievements of King Arthur in verse. It was left
to Tennyson to make use of the rich material for poetic compo-
sition. His immediate source of inspiration was Malory’s Morte^d
Arthur. Tennyson began to use these legends in his Morte'd
Arthur- (1843). The epic idea probably came to bis mind at a
later stage, and when the twelve idylls^ were completed, the poet
sought to give them an epic unity by combining them in a compact
form. But it would not be proper to call the Idylls as an epic.
They lack unity. They are twelve separate stories in blank verse
grouped round the central figure of King Arthur, The absurdity
of calling these idylls as epic would be clear if we .consider their
order of composition; they began at the end, reached the beginning
in the middle and the middle at the close.

( 16 )

Tennyson used Malory’s Morte^d Arthur as his source but,
he stripped the tales of Malory of their *boId bawdry’ to please
the people of his times. He covered them with an allegorical and
symbolic meaning, and decked them with his delicate and detailed
ornamentation. The allegory in these Idylls of the King may not
be clearly marked out, but an tundercurrent of allegorical meaning
can certainly be detected in the personalities of the Idylls. King
Arthur stands for the ideal of perfection, and Sir Bedivere for
wordly wisdom. The three Queens are the three Christian virtues of
Faith, Hope and Charity.

It is one of the special characteristics of Tennyson’s Idylls
that though the subject treated by him is medieval, yet the manner
in whichlit has been treated is modern. The Arthurian legends
expressed in the idiom of the nineteenth century were adapted to
the sentiment of the Victorian age. King Arthur is a gentleman
of the nineteenth century. His grave chiding of Guinevere at the
d iscovcry of her sin is like a gentleman of the Victorian era rather
than a man belonging to the age of chivalry. In short, as Hugh
Walker suggests, ^‘Tennyson, made it the great end of his art to
express the modern spirit in the Idylls of the king, and the
delineation of other times only as a means to that end.” ‘*The
Idylls, therefore, spoke more eloquently to Victorian than to
modern readers, many of whom prefer the robust and barbarous
medieval originals to Tennyson’s decorous moralistic visions of
them. The poet’s technical resourcefulness, his rich patterns of
sounds and images, no longer veils the lack of passion and the
presence of priggishness in these once famous tales.”

Entirely different in spirit is another collection of poems
called English Idylls, which Tennyson began in 1842. In these
English Idylls he intended to portray ideals of widely different
types of English life. Of these varied poems, the most significant
and worthy of study are Dora, Ulysses, Locksley Hall
and Enoch Arden His poem Dora is an experiment in
Wordsworthian blank narrative, which is mildly skilful but lacks
the Wordsworthian tone of intimate exploration of meaning.
Ulysses is a poem of inspiration and exhorts young and old alike
to be active and vigorous in life without letting the thought of
death cramping their enthusiasm. Locksley Hall a . study of

( 17 )

Gontempojeacy social and political life and is marked with a note
of optimism and progress. It takes the form of a monologue
in which the speaker, revisiting Locksley H^ll, the home of his
youth, recalls his love for his beloved Anny, who out of deference
to her parents had rejected his love and married a man of the
world rolling in luxury and wealth. This leads him to conjure up
again his youthful vision of the progress of the world in which he
finally expresses his confidence.

Enoch Arden (1864) is a popular work and poetises the life
of the lowly people that make up the bulk of English life. Here
the poet leaves the medieval Knights and Lords and deals with
the story of Enoch who had married Arden. Enoch was reported
to be drowned. He returned safe and found his wife happily
married to another man. He regretfully returned without reveal-
ing his identity to his wife or her lover. The poem is rich in
descriptions of nature and flights of poetic imagination. This
long narrative poem, “tries to wring heroic significance out of a
domestic situation treated with a moral feeling so “Victorian” (in
the popular sense of the word) that all real life and complexity
are lacking.”*

Tennyson’s later volumes, like the Ballads (1880) and
Demeter (1889) should not be overlooked by the reader, since in
them arc found some of his best poems. Lockstey Hall Sixty Years
Aft^r and the Death of OEnone are some of the finest poems
echoing the sumptuous imaginings of the years preceding 1842.

The study of Tennyson’s poetry exhibits the great variety of
his verse. ^'Tennyson owed much of bis cotemporary fame to
the variety of his work. His verse was an instrument which could
express every mood, from the airiness of a cradle song to the
sonorous sorrow of a funeral ode. He could write for the many
in the sentimental strains of the May Queen^ and for the few in
the noble verse of Ulysses and Tithonus- He could express a
national emotion with spirit and fire as in the Charge of the Light,
Brigade: he could delight men of science by his minute observation,
as in the lines on the dragon fly in the Two Voices, and he could
win the approval of philosophers by the profound experience of
‘ his elegiac and reflective verse. With this wide range be had also a

* David Dafcbass A Cridcal History efBoglish Uterature (Volume ILl

( 18 )

perfection of technique which made his English not only wonder-
fully expressive but free from every offence of harshness and
monotony.”

Tennyson’s dramatic works arc not of great signiffeance. He
wrote three historical plays — Queen Mary (W75), Harold {1816)
and Becket {1884). In these plays he sought to dramatise the
national histoy of England. They are not successful. "None,
however, rank high as real dramatic efforts, though they show
much care and skill.” The Falcon U879) is a comedy based on a
story from Baccacio. The Cup (1881) owes its inspiration to
Plutarch, and r/te is a dramatisation of the old Robin

Hood theme.

Q, 5. ‘*It will be right for the future historians to tieat Tennyson
as a representative of the Victorian period and to draw
inferences from his work as to the general, intellectual and
political tendencies of the nineteenth century’’ (Lyall)*
Discuss.

OR

*^As a poet who expresses not so much a personal as a
national spirit, Tennyson is probably the most representative
literary man of the Victorian era.” (W. J. Long). Discuss.

Ans. Tennyson stands in the same relation to his times as
Chaucer does to the fourteenth century and Alexander Pope to
the early eighteenth century. He is truly "the glass of fashion
and the mould of form” of the Victorian period as Spenser was of
the Elizabethan age. He is the typical Victorian poet voicing in
his poetry the hopes and aspirations, the doubts and scepticism,
the refined culture and the religious liberalism of the age* Uke a
detached but intent spectator he closely watched the ebb and flow
of events happening in his country. He believed that it was the
function of a poet to penetrate and interpret the spirit of bis own
age for the future generations, and true to his poetic cteed, he
presented flawlessjly the Victorian age in its varied aspects in his
poetry. "For nearly half a century” sajs^ J. XiQng, "Tennysdn
was not only a man and a poet, he was a voice, the votee. pf a

( 19 )

whole people, expressing in exquisite melody their doubts and
their faith, griefs and their triumphs. As a poet who expresses
not 80 much a personal as a national spirit, he is probably the
most representative literary man of the Victorian era.’* To quote
Stopford A. Brook, **For more than sixty years he lived close to
the present life of England, as far as he was capable of compre-
hending and sympathising with its movements; and he interwove
what he felt concerning into his poetry. That Tennyson’s poetry
was an epitome of his times, that it exhibited the society, the art,
the philosophy, the religion of his day, was proved by the wel-
come which all classes gave it.”

Tennyson faithfully reflected the various aspects of Victorian
life in his poetry. ‘‘The change which Tennyson’s thought under
went in regard to social and political questions itself reveals his
curious sensitiveness to the tendencies of his time; for the sanguine
temper of his early manhood, the doubt, the misgivings, and
reactionary utterances of his middle age, and the chastened hope-
fulness of his last years, are alike reflections of successive moods
which were widely characteristic of his generation.”* It will be
our endeavour now to examine how faithfully the poet is the organ
voice of his age.

The Victorian ere was essentially an age of peace and
settled government. The old fire of revolutionary enthusiasm had
been quenched and the people of the age longed for a life of
settled order, stability, and peace. “They did not want excite-
ment. They wished to be soothed and assured. They had enough
of tremendous thoughts in familiar shape. They now wanted
familiar thoughts in tremendous shape.” The Victorians had a
love for law, order and discipline. Tumult and storm and the
revolutionary feelings upsetting established conventions were
frowned by the Victorians. Tennyson reflects this craving of the
age for the authority of law, and settled order. The dominant
element in Tennyson’s thought is his sense of law. The thing
which most pleases and impresses him is the spectacle of order
in the universe. The highest praise showered by Tennyson on
his country is that she is ^a land of settled government where
freedom Js ever broadening down from precedent to precedent.”

* W. H, Hudsem: An Outline Histeryof Bnglisb Uteratore*

( 20 )

The poet finds the working of law even in the sorrows and losses
of humanity. ‘Nothing is that errs from law.’ This insistence on
law and order constrains the poet to conform to certain established
conventions of society rather than accept individualism and the
unbridled freedom to act according to one’s whims and fancies.
Tennyson believed in slow progress and shunned revolution
upsetting the order of society. He was essentially the poet of
law and order as well as of progress; he held tenaciously to the
great heritage of English tradition, and while he firmly believed
in the divine scheme of things —

The old order changeth^ yielding place to new

And God fulfils Himself in many ways

Lest one good custom should corrupt the worlds

he was quite as firmly opposed to “raw haste” and rash expefi-
ments and everything that savoured of revolution.

Politically the age was striking a compromise between the
growing tide of democracy and political freedom to the masses
and the continuation of the old order of aristocracy. Tennyson
presents this compromising spirit of the age in his poetry. While
conceding the claims of coming democracy he upholds the old
aristocracy. Recluse and aristocratic as he was, he was profound*
ly interested in common people and common things, and it is not
the least significant feature of his work in the mass that along
with The princess^ Maudf The Idylls of the Kingt it contains such
things as The May Queen, Enoch Arden and Dora^

Patriotism and love for the country were the significant
features of the age. Victorians took pride in their nation and
national glories. In Tennyson’s poetry the sense of national pride
and glory is well sounded. He represents English life and manners
with utmost sincerity. The Northern Farmer is the true picture of
Lincolnshire peasants and The Northern Cobbler and Village Wife
are all national portraits depicting the rustic life of England. In
the £/ig//5/z /dv//5, Tennyson reflects the ideals of widely different
types of English life. His praise for his own counti^ is the
expression of a Victorian patriot who considered his country,
superior to other countries of the world. Speaking of England,
Tennyson says —

( 21 )

It is th^ land that free men till
That sober-suited freedom choose.

The land where girt with friends and foes,

A man may speak the thing he will,

A land of settled government,

A land of just and old renown*

Tennyson is eminently a Victorain in his concept of love
and his high regard for domestic virtues. In his attitude towards
women he is a true Victorian. The Victorians did not approve of
women’s struggling for rights of franchise and equality with
man. Women were created for looking after the household. This
faith of the Victorians in the subordinate position of women is
expressed by Tennyson in The Princess (1847) wherein he suggests
that woman’s role is to be a good housewife and enjoy the blessed
good life of the home. Woman’s place was the hearth. Nature
had ordained :

if an for the field and woman for the hearth^

Man for the sword and for the needle she^

Man to command and woman to obey
All else confusion.

Coming to the subject of Love and Sex the Victorians
sought a compromise between unbridled licentiousness of previous
ages and the complete negation of the functions and purposes of
nature. The Victorians condemned illegal gratification of the sex
urge. Tennyson reflects this spirit of the age by pointing out
again and again in his love poems that true love can be found no
where else save in married life. He cannot even contemplate the
possibility of any relation between man and woman other than the
conjugal. He emphasises the cultivation of domestic virtues of
the home. He idealises married life. The kind of love that
Tennyson upholds and likes is well exemplified in The Miller* s
Daughter It is a simple story of true sweet-hearting and married
love, but raised into a steady and grave emotion worthy of a love^
built to last for life betwixt a man and a woman. This was the
kind of love that Tennyson eulogises and the Victorians very much
thanked the poet for presenting the higher sense of love. Tennyson
concentrates very firmly upon the advantages of spiritual as
opposed to . pbysicaMove, and the age felt satisfaction in, his d^li-.

( 22 )

aettion of love. The Victorian feeling is voiced by the poet
when he says —

Arise and fly

The reeling Faun, the sensual feast,

Move upward, working out the beast.

And let the ape and tiger die.

This inevitably leads us to the ‘Victorian priggishness,
which Tennyson reflects in his longer poems.

The Victorians who upheld moral virtues in domestic life were
at heart moralists. They had a particular fascination for moralis-
ing and teaching lessons of morality to the younger generations.
In this respect Tennyson is the mouthpiece of the Victorians. In
Tennyson’s poetry there is a strong feeling for moral preaching
and ethical edification. He is a moralist giving to his readers the
proper guidance for the wise conduct of life. Tennyson, to quote
Grierson, “was determined to add the tin kettle of a didactic in-
tention to the tails of his poem.” He turned to the Greek legends
not so much for the sake of their beauty as for their ethical
significance. The legendary Ulysses imparts the message of action
and urges the readers.

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Tennyson believes that the aim of the poet should not be to
provide aesthetic delight only. He is also a seer and a prophet,
and as such his poetry should serve as an animating and enliven-
ing fotce for his generation. In The Palace of Art the poet des-
cribes and condemns the spirit of aestheticism whose sole religion
is the worship of Beauty and Knowledge for their own sake.

“While, however, Tennyson’s poetry I is thus historically
interesting on the social and political sides, it is even mote
important as a record of the intellectual and spiritual life of the
time. A careful student of science and philosophy, he. vae
deeply impressed by the far-reaching meaning of the . new'
discoveries and speculation by which the edifice of the old thought
had been undermined, and especially by the wide b«icingB of the
doctrine of evolution; and at once sceptical and mystical, in .his..
6Wtt temper, he was peculiarly fitted to become the., mouthpkpp

( 23 )

o£ his centacy^s doubts, difficulties, and ctaving for the cettanities
of religious faith. The two voices of that century are pepetually
heard in his work; in In Memoriamt more than in any contempo-
rary piece of verse or prose, we may read of its great conflict of
doubt and faith; while in many later poems as notably in
The Ancient Sage we may see how the poet challenged the current
materialism and asserted the eternal verities of God and
immortality.”

There remains more faith in honest\doubt
Beleive me than in half the creeds.

But Tennyson does not, thereby, surrender the claims of
religion, God and soul. He triumphantly declares his faith in
God and the immortality of the soul and in a life beyond death.
He advises the people of his age to cling to faith beyond all forms
of faith, to trust in the large hope, to look to —

One far-off divine event

To which the who e creation moves.

In the Higher Pantheism he declares the ^supremacy of God
and regards Him as the supreme controller of the universe —

God is law, say the wise : O Soul, and let us rejoice
For if He thunder by law the thunder is yet his voice.

In every object of Nature and also in the sun, the moon and
the stars the poet sees the vision of God—

The sun, the moon, the stars^ the seas^ the hills and

the plains

Are not those a Soul ! the vision of Him who reigns-
One result of the advance of science was the almost
disappearance of imagination and emotion from the life of the age.
This lack of imagination is found in Tennyson’s descriptions of
Nature, where nothing is left for the imagination and every object is
minutely described with the precision and exactness of a scientist.
In this Inspect Tennyson upholds the claim, of science, though he
sounds the final triumph of faith. It is, ip fact, after passing throu^
the^vale of pessimism brought forth by the theories of science in
. Maud and Locksley Hall that Tennyson arrives at the truth of
religion and declares in In Memoriam’^

; Oh^et we trust that soma haw good
Will be the fined goal of ill.

( 24 )

The poet starts looking for some purpose behind the entire
treation, add comes to the conclusion —

That nothing walks with aimless feet

That not one life shall be destroyed,

Tennyson thus gives expression to the scientific spirit of the
age, the unrest that is brought in Maud and Locksley HalU and
ultimately arrives at the haven of peace in Higher Pantheism and
In Memoriam, In all these aspects it will be right for tbe future
historian to treat Tennyson as a representative of the Victorian
periods His finest poetry is undoubtedly "an illustrative record
of the prevailing spirit, of the temperament, and to some degree
of the national character of his period.” In his verse he is truly
"the glass of fashion and the mould of form” of the Victorian
generation in the nineteenth century as Spenser was of the
Elizabethan Court, Milton of the Protectorate and Pope of the
reign of Queen Anne.

He presented in his poetry all the essential features of
Victorian life, "the ideas and tastes, the inherited predilections
belonging to his class and generation; moderation in politics,
refined culture, religious liberalism cbequred by doubt, a lively
interest in the advance of scientific discovery coupled with alarm
lest it should lead us astray, attachments to ancient institutions,
larger views of 4uty, of state towards its people, and increasing
sympathy with poverty and distress — all these Victorian feelings
find expression in Tennyson’s poems.”

Q 6. Write a note on Tennyson as a Thinker with particular reference
to his social outlook and attitude towards human lifct his
political views and his religious and philosophical thoughts.

Ans. "As a thinker” says Albert, "Tennyson lacked depth
and originality.” His social, political, religious, and philosophical
thoughts were governed and dominated by the tendencies of his
kge. His thoughts fail to ^attract the modern readers for in them
they scarcely find any spark of originality bir progressive thlnkiiijg.
With these remarks let us now examine T^ennyson’s atti&dc to-*
wards different aspects and thoughts of age.

( 25 )

Social outlook aud attitude towards humaa life

In his social outlook and general attitude towards human life
Tennyson was a conservative, an old fashioned gentleman, who
looked with eyes of disfavour at any social progress that the
masses might be able to achieve under the inspiring idealism of a
democratic life. He was pretty conscious of the social problems
rising out of the transformation of England from an agricultural
country to an industrial country. The miseries and sufferings of
the poor workers and labourers were before his eyes, but he was
not sympathetically moved by their sufferings. Being a nation-
al poet, he apparently showed his concern with them and gave
expression to his sympathy in such poems as The Northern Cobblery
The Princess, Children’s Hospital, Rizpah^ but his sympathy was
merely lip-sympathy never emerging from a sincere feeling for
their distress. Instead of holding the perverse social system res-
ponsible for the sufferings of the poor and the down-trodden,
Tennyson considered that the sins of men were ultimately respon-
sible for their sufferings. The tragedy of Rizpah was the result
of robbery; the calamities of Oenonc were the outcome of a
husband who was an adulterer. The remedy that the poet
suggested for removing social sufferings was not any reform in
the malpractices and wrong adjustments of social life, but a reform
of the moral conduct of the depraved human beings. If a man
strictly followed the law of morality and led a disciplined life, he
could pass through life’s voyage smoothly.

Tennyson’s treatment of social evils such as unemployment,
low wages, drunkenness, poverty, squalor was unsatisfactory. His
sympathies for the poor might have been genuine, but they have
been put in the mouths of weak characters like the neurotic lover
of Maud or the young but dismal prig in Locksley Hall. The
feelings expressed by them do not appear to be the spontaneous
feelings of a poet’s heart. Commenting on the unsatisfactory
handling of social problems a critic has very aptly remarked,
**When (Tennyson) brings himself face to face with the actual
details of life lived in poverty, squalor, and crime, he is sullenly
uphopefuL In fact, he looks upon the whole question from the
point of view of the comfortable burgess, not of the poor man
hiniBelf who stand the grim of the actual sacrifice. Ha gaaes

( 26 J

down from his sunny vantage ground of aesthetic refinement
where no wind blows roughly. He never steps down into the thick
of the struggle, and never makes those unjustly suffer feel that in
him they have a comrade and a champion.”

Tennyson’s treatment of the one single burning problem of
the *new woman’ and her position in human society in the Princess
( 1847 ) clearly shows that he was not prepared to grant women
the same political and economic rights as man had in Victorian
Society. In his view the role of woman was to look after the
household and enjoy happy married life rather than vex her head
with political rights and responsibilities. We hear the poet
singing—

Man for the field and woman for the hearth
Man for the sword and for needle ^he
Man with the head and woman with the heart
Man to command and woman to obey-

Tennyson’s general attitude towards the masses and the
poorer section of the community was one of supercilious disregard
rather than genuine appreciation and sympathy. He had no real,
warm and intimate sympathy with the common people. At heart
Tennyson was an aristocratic English man and he insisted on
maintaining social differences between the rich and the poor. He
opposed the idea of levelling down all social distinctions. In fact,
he was more interested in kings, princes, men and women of
intellectual power and delicate refinement than with mediocres and
common people having no standard and intellectual brilliance
in them. He was drawn to an environment of culture and
good lineage. King Arthur was obviously his ideal of manhood.
The women whom he adored were gentle, patient and enduring
souls. **When he touched the lives ot the poor there was just
a suspicion of the average well meaning district visitor about his
tone.” If he was attracted by the rank and file, it was only with
the people who were quaint and eccentric particularly in their old
age. He could laugh with the Northern Farmer for he was an old
man with eccentric feelings. Eccentric youth only roused his
impatience. If he treated the youthful idealist as in Locksley Hall,
he, only made him a prig. He was not at all attracted by the hot-
hlooded evolutionary,^ nor a visionary idealist. Elemental, emo^

( 27 )

tions of youth had no attraction for him. “In his general outlook
on life, he grew to distrust more and more, passion as an elemental
force and strove to idealise and spiritualise it, whether as a force
in political society or in sexual relationships.”

In his attitude towards human life, Tennyson laid emphasis
on law, order and discipline. Cultivation of moral values could
alone bring about the salvation of human life. In his view:

Self -reverence, self-knowledge, self-comrol
Tlie.se three alone lead life to sovereign power.

Tennyson’s Political Views

In his political views Tennyson was a conservative disdain-
ing revolutionary changes in human society. While admitting the
necessity of change, he insisted that change should be gradual and
evolutionary in character. He was not at all in favour of a
revolution that might upset the settled order of law and usher in
the unhealthy rule of the mob. The sweeping tide of democracy
bringing the common man to the forefront was looked upon ‘ with
frowning eyes by the poet. He had no faith in demorracy,
equality or fraternity. He had something of a contempt for the
people whom he designed as the ‘rabblement". He wrote in
Lockb ely Hall —

Slowly comes a hungry people as lion creeping nigher

Glares at one that nods and winks behind slowly dying fire.

He had none of the revolutionary enthusiasm of Byron, nor
coul,d he breathe a feeling of righteous indignation at the deplo-
rable . s^te of the people sunk in the mire of poverty and disease!.'
He upheld the old order based on class division rather than
accepted a classless society. The radical democratic passion of
Shelley, that sought to obliterate class division in the main, found ,
no response in Tennyson’s breast. '‘He was” to quote Compton-
Rickett, “an aristocrat in feeling, and though quick to resent the
abuse of class privileges had no more confidence in the voice of,
the people than Carlyle himself. Tennyson believed in the Great.
Man theory, though he never confounded ‘Might with Right’ to
the same extent ^s the author of the Latter Day Pamphlets-*^ .

Tennyson believed in law, order and settled government. He
loved and liked England for it was —

A land of titled government

( 28 )

A land of first and old renown
Where freedom slowly broadens down
From precedent to precedent

To quote Lyall, Tennyson we have the Englishman's
ingrained abhorrence of unruly disorder, the tradition of a State
well balanced, of liberty fenced in by laws, of veneration for the
past; we have hatred of fanaticism in any shape, political or
clerical, the distrust of popular impatience, the belief in the gradual
betterment of human ills. When he was asked what politics he
held, he answered characteristically, "I am of the same politics as
Shakespeare, Bacon and every sane man.”

Tennyson believed in the cultivation of one virtue, patrio-
tism and love for England. In this respect he was a thoroughgoing
Englishman. The^sentiment of patriotism flourished best in his-
mind and we hear echoes of this patriotic love for his country in
such lines as —

There is no land like England
Where’er the light of day be.

There are no hearts like English hearts.

Such hearts of Oak as they be

There is no land like England
Where’er the light of day be
There are no men like Englishmen
So tall and bold as they be*

He showed the bulldog qualities of the English race and
the militant nationalism of a powerful nation in such poems as
The Charge of the Light Brigade, Ballad of the Fleet, The Defence
of Lucknow, The Revenge. «It is really a pity that Tennyson’s
patriotism should subserve so exclusively thet rampet and battleaxe
and neglect the triumphs won outside of the battlefield.”

In his foreign and imperial politics Tennyson had the vision
of a narrow insular patriot who considered all foreigners as devils
and all democratic movements on the continents as devilish. **The
blind hysterics of the Celt” and “The blood on Seine”
showed a grave narrowness of vision and limitation of sympathy.
“It would have been better and the sweeter” says Compton^Rickett,
“If Tennyson had understood other nationalities as well as he did his
wo race, since cosmopolitan sympathies strengthen in place of

( 29 )

weakening the spirit of patriotism.” But Tennyson could not
grow out his narrow nationalism and insular^patriotism and if he
had any praise, it was for his country only which he expressed
with the air of a proud Englishman —

It is the land that free men till
That sober-suited Freedom chose
The land, where girt with friends .or foes
A man may speak the thing he will.

Tennyson’s Religious and Philosophical Outlook

‘‘Harm has been done by those who have spoken of Tennyson’s
philosophy whether to exalt or belittle him”, says Bradley, “for he
was not a philosopher, any more than Wordsworth was or
Browning or Meredith, though he shows, I think, more signs than
they of the gift that makes a philosopher.” As a religious and
philosophical thinker Tennyson has expressed his thoughts on
soul, God, union of the soul with the Divine Being, immortality
of the soul, progress of the human race and the ultimate destiny
of man and nature in the universe.

Tennyson lived at a time when the conflict between religion
and science was coming to a head. Materialism was growing apace
and shaking the very roots of religious faith and morality. People
were fascinated more and more by the artificial glamour of
material progress. Many religious men were tottering in their
faith in face of the revolutionary and evolutionary theories of
science. Tennyson, essentially a religious man at heart, was also
afFccted by the new theories of science particularly by the theory
of Evolution propounded by Darwin. The scientific ideas of the
age affected him. “No poet was more exercised by religious
problems than he; and no poet was more sensitive to scientific
thought than he. But his attitude is an attitude of compromise;
he propounds a via media between the materialistic science of his
day and dogmatic Christianity.” Tennyson’s attitude was neither
purely scientific nor purely religious. He equally welcomed
the influence of historic Christianity and modern scientific
thoughts. He stated —

There remains more faith in honest doubt
Believe me than in half the creeds.

In an age when more of Science was colouring man’s
thoughts and demolishing bis faith in God and His supremacy in

( 30 )

the universe, Tennyson had the courage to declare that God, the
Almighty was the creator of the universe and the reflection of His
personality was visible in all the physical and spiritual aspects of
life. Man’s soul was a part of the divine soul and had its being
from the soul of God. The ultimate redemption of the human
soul lay in its final merger with the divine soul of the universe.
Man’s birth upon the earth marked his division from the Divine :
Earth, these solid stars^ this w eight of body and limb
Are they not the sign and symbol of thy division from Him ?

On one occasion Tennyson is reported to have said to a friend,
**There is something that watches over us and our individuality
endures; that is my faith, and that is all my faith.”

Man should strive to be once again with the Almighty God
and thereby attain the goal of union with the soul of the universe.
This union of the human soul with the divine soul could be possi*-
ble if man followed the path of morality, truth, righteousness
and virtue. Only a life of morality and virtue could once again
bring about the union of the human soul with divine soul, and
his great effort in In Memoriam had been to prove that the dust
returns to the dust, but the divine spark in man seeks to unite
with the divine soul of the universe. He could never believe
that the individual world may one day come to an end.

Tennyson confidently asserted that at the back of the uni-
verse there was God, who ruled over the entire world. In the
Higher Pantheism he made his position very clear when he
The sun^ the moon, the stars the seas, the hills and the plains
Are not these, O Soul, the vision of Him who reigns.

Tennyson went a step further and admitted divine inter-
vention in all the affairs of man. It was a debatable question
whether God was in any way interested or interfered in the affairs
of man. Scientists were not prepared to accept any divine interven-
tion in human affairs; Tennyson upheld the view that God was
interested in the affairs of man and His power was visible in human
life. There was something like divine help or anger which human
beings felt in their lives. “There is something that watches over
us, and our individuality endures; that’s my faith, and that’s all
my faith” he is reported to have said on one occasion to a friend.
In the Ancient Sage we have the feeling that the activities of

( 31 )

human life wefe the result of the Divine presence sustaining the
entire system of being : —

If the Nameless ^should withdraw from all

Thy frailty counts most real, all thy world

Might vanish like the shadow in the dark*

All the visible things were the signs and shadows of the
invisible, the intimations of some eternal power or Divinity. If
He withdraws Himself from the objects of the world, the entire
cosmos shall vanish like a, shadow vanishing in the darkness.

Tennyson believed that so long as the universe was governed
by God, the progress of the human race was certain, though the
course of progress might be chequered. Progress would be slow,
but ultimately man would rise to heights of his spiritual glory.
Jn the posthumous volume he wrote of a time when the moans
of the earth which now whirls through space would have grown
‘sphere’ music, and man would evolve to higher heights —

While the races flower and fade

Prophet eyes map catch a glory slowly gaining on the shade

Till the people all are one^ and all their voice^s blend in choric

Hallellujah to the Maker, *It is finished, man is Made/ #

* But this hope for the ultimate perfectability of man was
by no means the main element of Tennyson’s faith. The main
pillars of his faith were his belief in the guidance of the universe
by a God who is Love, in the revelation of God’s love and the
divine law through Christ; in the immortality of the human
spirit, leading to some kind of ‘closing’ with the divine personality,
and in the freedom of the human will.

“Tennyson has been called a mystic; it would be more
correct to say he was mystical” says Compton-Rickett; for we do
not find in Tennyson the kind of mysticism we notice in Vaughan,
George Herbert and Blake. He was at his best “a rationalist with
a tenacious strain of mysticism in his nature. No thoroughgoing
mystic would have dealt at such length and with such significant
emphasis, upon the difficulties of religious faith; no thoroughgoing
rationalist would have tried to solve the difficulties by claiming
for the intuition of the heart, a way out of the morass of
scepticism.” The only trace of mysticism to be found in his

( 32 )

poetry is faith, in the power of intuition to solve all difficulties
aoi;iijiig ill l&e wray of a man of faith. In his mystical way Tennyson
thought that intuition could solve all the problems of human
life.

Tennyson was through and through a religious minded
man. He believed that ‘^somehow good will be the final goal of
ill.” It was not a philosophy of faith so much as a philosophy of
hope. The poet hoped that things would take a turn for the
good. Tennyson had to struggle hard for his faith against personal
doubts raised by Science. His ultimate faith was.

That God, which ever lives and loves
One God, one law, one el ement.

The one far-off divine event
To which the whole creation moves*

Tennyson had certain philosophical thoughts . which he had
expressed with great force in Ulysses and In Memoriam. He
believed in action and Ulysses is a standing monument in the
glorification of action even in the face of death and decay. He
laid emphasis on *to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.^
He advocated pursuit of knowledge and higher values of life —
¥ro follow knowledge^ like a sinking star
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

Tennyson laid equal emphasis on the cultivation of love.
He conceived of God as the embodiment of love. In Memoriam
opens with the line ; —

Strong Son of God, immortal love.

As a philosopher Tennyson believed in the freedom of
Human will. In In Memoriam he expressed his faith in free will
in the following line : —

Our Wills are ours, we know not how.

He propagated the doctrine of free will because without granting
the principle of the free will, the doctrine of moral responsibility
would be meaningless.

Another aspect of his philosophy was that *men may rise
on stepping stones of their dead selves to higher things. ’ This is
well expressed in In Memoriam* Tennyson believed in the gospel
of progress and advancement in human life. He believed in
evolution rather than revolution. It was his faith that naaie! and

( 33 )

things were imperceptibly aspiring to a higher state. This evolu
tionary process o£ moral progress is the sheet anchor o£ Tennyson’s
transcendentalism. His £aith in life beyond life and life beyond
death is e^epressed in Sir Galahad, Enoch Ardeiu and Locksley
Hall Sixty Years After,

Q. 7. Write a note on Tennyson as an Artist touching upon
bis achievements as (1) A Metrical artist (2) A Pictorial artist
(3) An Artist in general.

Or

Do yon agree with the view that Tennyson inspite of his merits
as a Thinker was essentially a poet and an artist ?

Ans. Tennyson was primarily a poet and an artist, and it
is as a poet and skilled craftsman in verse that he will be
remembered in future years to come. No doubt his poetry is a
clear reflection of his thoughts on the social, economic and
political problems of his day, yet his fame does not rest on his
thoughts, but on his achievements as an ^^Artist. As a thinker
he was not of the first order. Albert says, *‘As a thinker Tennyson
lacked depth and originality.” Harold Nicholson points out,
‘‘Tennyson was unfortunately a very inferior intellectual thinker.”
His thoughts on the political, social, and religious problems do
not have any depth, profundity and originality. All his thoughts
are of his age and were commonly shared by the people of his
time. The merit of Tennyson lies in giving them a poetic form
and shape. There is nothing impressive about them. Inspite of
his treatment of the problem of democracy, rights and position
of women, commercial aristocracy, immortality of the soul,
the supremacy of God as creator of the universe, we do not seem
to be satisfied with what he says except in a general way. Some
of his views, as for example, on the position and privilege of
women and the common people have become outmoded and unpro-
gressive. They have no appeal to the modern men and women.
Hence if the greatness of Tennyson is to be judged purely on
the basis of his thoughts and ideas on the problems of his age, he
will not be able to occupy a significant place in the galaxy of
English poets. We will call him a chronicler of his times, who just
chose io be a poetic bard of his age and nothing more. But that is

( 34 )

not the case with Tennyson. Inspitc of his being a Victorian poet
voicing in poetry the hopes and aspirations of the people of his times»
Tennyson enjoys his farae and name. It is not by what he ‘said’ but by
how he said it that Tennyson has been able to win for himself a
host of admirers. It is the manner, the poetic style, and the
skilled craftsmanship of the poet that have earned for him a
lasting place among the poets of his country. It is by virtue of
his qualities as a consummate artist that he is remembered and
adored to-day. R. C. Jebb writes, “The gifts by which Tennyson
has and will keep his place among the great poets of England are
pre-eminently those of an artist.” R. Brimley Johnson says,
‘■Tennyson was before all things a flawless artist.”

As a metrical Artist

Tennyson’s mastery of rhythm and metre is commendable.
“Here is the absolute sway of metre, compelling every rhyme and
measure needful to the thought; here are sinuous alliterations,
unique and varying breaks and pauses, winged flights and falls,
the glory 1 , of sound and colour everywhere present.” From the
beginning of his poetic career Tennyson exhibited his
interest in metrical experiments. His first volume. Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical published in 1830, at the age of twenty one, showed that
the poet had mastered the principles of English prosody and had
understood how those principles could actually be applied in
poetic composition. In these early poems every variety of rhythm
was dexterously employed, though the ‘rising’ foot was more
common than the ‘falling’. Both dactyls and anapaests were
freely used to give the air of rhythm, speed and lightness.

Tennyson’s second volume of poems published in 1842
indicated that the poet’s grasp of structure and rhythm was
steadily increasing. The Lady of Shallot was the triumph of
metrical art. The entire poem was written in a stanza of seven
lines, the first four all with the same rhyme-ending, and a refrain
after the third and fourth lines. It was a difficult metre but
Tennyson handled it with great lightness and freedom. The Two
Voices in the form of a dialogue between the tempter and the
man bent upon suicide, was composed in a stanza of three short
lines with a single rhyme and sledge hammer regularity which
gave to the dialogue a great force. In the Lotos-Eaters the skill

( 35 )

o£ the poet matured. The introductory lines arc in the Spenserian
stanza. ‘The choric song’ is written in iambic lines which vary
in length between three feet and seven feet. The rhythm is
considerably manipulated by the inversion of iambics into troches.
The poem forestalls the method of Maud. The rhythm is adapted
successfully to the fluctuating emotions of the theme. The move-
ment of the lines is in conformity with the thoughts of the mariners.
In adjusting the thoughts with the rhythm of the lines Tennyson
achieved great success.

In In Mtmoriam Tennyson perfected the stanza of four
lambic lines of four feet each with enclosed rhymes (ab ba).
Instead of being monotonous the stanza proved to be eminently
successful. The quatrain stanza of In Memoriam had earlier been
used by Lord, Herbert of Cherbury and by Ben Jonson, but
Tennyson stole a march over them by manipulating the rhythm.

In Maud Tennyson produced a lyrical monologue of 1200
lines representing the story of love, death and madness. The metre
of Maud is iambic but it is plentifully varied with anapaests. The
lines vary in length from six feet to three and the rhyme schemes
are exceedingly fluid and so well managed that, although the
rhyme is hardly ever obtrusive, it never fails to act as an effective
link in the- chain of sound. By these means Tennyson evolved a
form of extraordinary speed, fluency and adaptability.

Tennyson employed blank verse in The Princess^ English
Idyll Idylls of the King. Blank verse had been used by the
Elizabethans and by Milton. Tennyson’s blank verse has a natural
freedom, simplicity and tenderness. When his theme is reflective
and oratorical, the blank verse becomes, ‘-melodious, sonorous,
variously paused and felicitously drawn into paragraph. In
narrative pieces like Morte D" Arthur it has strength and conden-
sation whereas in Ulyssts it has epic grandeur, sublimity and slow
movement.” “Tennyson’s blank verse” says Charles Teanyson
in Six Tennyson s Essays “has not the majesty of Milton s, nor
the rhetorical splendour and freedom of Shelley’s, nor the natural
eloquence and dignity of Wordsworth’s; but it has striking merits
of its own chief among which are, I think, its amazing flexibility,
and its power of achieving, through rhythm and vowel music, a
lyrical, singing quality which no other poet has attained in the

( 36 )

same degree.” ‘‘Tennyson’s blank verse” says Compton-Rickett,
“is inespressibly finer in quality than any attempted by the poets
of the Romantic Revival, and to rival it one must go back to
Milton.”

Tennyson’s great merit as a metrical artist lies in three
directions. In the first place he knew the art of adapting sound to
sense. The movement of his lines exactly reflects the sense. This
is presented in a remarkable manner in the opening lines of the
Lotos EaterSy where an atmosphere of sleepiness and drowsiness
is being produced by the use of drowsy and soft syllables.
Nicholson says, “One has only to read the painting, spasmodic
interjection of Maud or the frenzied sweep of Boadicea, the
rattling galliambics of which, so unlike the effeminacy of the
Atits have all the fire of Borodin’s ff^or, to realise what a
remarkable talent Tennyson possessed for accomodating the
movement of his verse to its subject, for making the gradation
of his theme by the subltcr changes of key and intonation.”
Secondly, Tennyson was the master in the subtle and pervading
employment of alliteration. This exhibits his manual dexterity,
but alliteration is employed with rare skill by the poet —

The moan of doves in immemorial elmsy

and murmuring of innumerable bees, {The Princess),

Lastly, Tennyson’s mastery in vowel-music is unparalleled
in Victorian poetry. “Dexterous manipulation of vowel sounds
constitutes Tennyson’s most original contribution to the harmonics
of English language.” He took great pains to avoid harsher
guturals and sibilants from bis verse. It was his perfection of
vowel balance which made his poetry musical. It was by the
shifting of the stress, by the interchanges of vowel sounds and
by the use of alliteration, that Tennyson was able to vary the
inherent monotony of In Msmoriamy and add richness to the
melody of Lotos Eaters, The sense of music is equally conspicuous
in the melody of his diction. The mere sound of his words
and phrases lingers long in the mind. This is, in the main, due
to his selection of melodious vowels and liquid consonants, and
also to his skilful use of alliteration. Lastly bis use of onoma-
topoeic words — (through zig-zag paths and justs of pointed rocks)
enhances the sweet harmony of his use. An example of Tennyson’s

( 37 )

use of vowel-music is given from Lotos'-Eaters to show how mas-
terly did he use this device to create music in poetry —

And thro* the moss ivies creep.

And in the stream the long-leaved flowers weep.

And from the craggy ledge the poppy hangs in sleep.

As a musician in words Tennyson will always be loved.
His is the song the sirens sing. He carries his measures like a
flowing stream through the ups and downs of rhythmic scales.
His melodies vibrating and quivering sweetly resound in the ears>
and the high soaring flights of his rapturous chants entrance the
hearts of the readers.

Summing up, we can say that Tennyson, ^‘was one of the
most skilful metrists among English poets and could turn out
fascinating exercises in odd rhythms. He could write in 1868 such
a poem as Lucretious, the most daring and complex of his dramatic
monologues. And the same poet could write the rollicking
narrative ballad The Revenge and the two lively satirical dialect
monologues Northern Farmer : Old Style and Northern Farmer :
New Style. If he had lacked complexity, and, at times emotional
discipline, he could show himself master of the simple mood-lyric,
a brilliant manipulator of language to the ear, and a conscientious
craftsman who could work up a remarkably high polish to his
work. He remains one of the most skilful and within the area
he chose to cultivate one of the most professionally competent.***
As A Pictorial Artist

Tennyson was a great pictorial artist. He was gifted with
unrivalled powers of picturing a scene, a landscape, a person in
words marked with clarity and vividness. This art of pictorial
painting was learnt by the poet quite early in his life by keeping
Keats*^pictorial paintings as his models. His art was essentially
picturesque and he used words as the painter employs his brush
for conveying the impression of a scene in all its vivid glory and
colour. Steadman’s significant remarks in Victorian Poets regard-
ing Tcnnyson*s pictorial powers arc worth quoting. He says,
** Leaving the architecture of Tennyson*s poetry and coming to
the sentiment which it seeks to express we are struck at once by
the fact that an idyllic or picturesque mode of conveying that

* David Daiches: A Critical Hisioiy of Eogtisb Liioraturot Volume IL

{ 38 )•

sentiment is the one natural to his poet, if not the only one
permitted by his limitations,*’ Leaving aside Shakespeare, Spenser,
Keats, no poet was able to draw such gorgeous pictures of land-
scapes as Tennyson did. Nearly all Tennyson’s poems, even the
simplest, are rich in ornate descriptions of natural and other
scenes. "His method” says Albert, "is to seize upon appropriate
details, dress them in expressive and musical phrases, and thus
throw a glistening image before the reader’s eye.”

The Princess is rich in pictures of beauty and loveliness.
The finest pictorial painting of landscape is seen in The Lou i-
Eoters, where the poet draws the picture of the island in all the
richness of nature’s scenery. It was a land of streams in which
the Lotos-Eaters found themselves —

A land of streams I some^ like a downward smoke
Slow-^dropping veils of thinn* si lawn, did go;

And some thro’ wavering lights and shadows broke
Rolling a slumbrous sheet of foam below.

The Lady of Shallot is rich in splendid descriptions. The
opening lines of this poem vividly catch the scene —

On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye^

That clothe the wold and meet the sky:

And thro* the fold the road runs by
To many-towered Camelot.

His pictures of Nature in In Memoriam arc quite significant
and reflect the calmness of grief and provide an appropriate
ground to human sentiment —

Calm is the morn without a sound.

Calm as to suit a calmer grief
And only through the faded leaf
The chestnut pattering to the ground,

Tennyson remained through out his career as a poet the
superb master of imaginative descriptions. His Eagle is a poem
of six lines, but it is a fine piece of pictorial painting. It leaves
a picture which cannot be forgotten;

He clasps the crag with crooked hands
Close to the sun in lonely tt'uds
Ringed with the azure world, he stands.

( 39 )

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;

He watches from his mountain walls

And like a thunderbolt he falls.

A Dream of Fair Women is almost wholly composed of imagi-
native descriptions. O Enone has fine array of pictures, like that
suggested by the scenery of the Pyreness: —

The long brook falling this the c 'ov*n ravin

In cataract after cataract to the sea^

As An Artist in General

Tennyson was an artist of a high order, and he cultivated
the art of poetic composition with great labour and industry.
Like Keats he was a conscious and deliberate artist spending
considerable time and energy in perfecting the form and the style
of poetic expression. His ideal of poetry was that it should be
simple, sensuous and pictorial. The Poet’s Mind reveals his
conception of his art as a poet. In his view poetry should be
transparent, flowing, and crystal clear like the waters of a limpid
stream. In conformity with his principles he developed his
artistic qualities in a particular pattern of thought emphasising
on the necessity of cultivating the quality of simplicity, lucidity,
charity, sublimity, unity and completeness.

In Tennyson’s art the first thing that strikes us is simplicity
Nothing was ever done by the poet for effect. His style has the
stamp of simplicity, though simplicity never borders on the land
of baldness. ‘‘Vital sincerity or living correspondence between
idea and form, that absolute necessity for all fine art as for noble
life, was his, and it is contained in his simplicity.”

Clarity and lucidity are other traits of Tennyson’s art. He
never involved himself like Browning in the obscure and thorny
depths of metaphysics and theology. Stopford A. Brooke rightly
says, “Deliberately he did not attempt to write about that which
he could not express with lucidity of thought and form. He
determined to be clear.”

A sense of beauty and adoration of the beautiful aspects
of nature and human life characterised Tennyson’s art. He was
a votary of beauty. He possessed an unfailing instinct for form
in beauty. He had the power of shaping beauty and loveliness
in nature and human life. “His love of the skilfulness of art, the

( 40 )

careful study of words and their powers in verse, his mingled
strength and dainties — all his technique was not for its own sake,
but was first urged by his love of beauty.” Tennyson’s adoration
of beauty was very much like that of Keats. His cult of beauty
is embodied in three poems — The Poet, The Poet's Mind, and The
PoePs Song. He is highly sensitive to all forms of beauty-physical
as well as spiritual, and is a true artist in the adoration of
beauty.

Tennyson’s art has the stamp of sublimity, stateliness and
dignity about it. Nothing is written in a plebeian style. He
avoids all that is commonplace, and presents ordinary ideas in a
dignified way. He is a fastidious artist who believes in perfect
finish. ‘^Tennyson was one of those poets who, like Milton and
Wordsworth, consider themselves as consecrated spirits. This
sense of their vocation makes them reverence their work rather
than themselves. It imparts stateliness to their verse, gives it a
moral virtue, a spiritual strength, and emerges in a certain
grandeur or splendour of style.”

One of the greatest qualities of Tennyson as an artist is
that his poems, especially shorter ones, are marked with a note
of unity of impression and soundness of construction. Though
Tennyson’s longer poems may be wanting in this unity of impre-
ssion and construction, yet the lighter pieces, like Ulysses, The
Two Voices^ The Vision of Sin owe a great deal of their charm
to the unity of impression which they convey. "The best proof
of the great advance which Tennyson had made in the art of
construction is to be found in The Lotos- Eaters^ a piece which
can hardly be paralleled except in Spenser or in Thomson’s Castle
of Indolence**

Tennyson’s exquisite polish, chiselled phrases, and perfection
of form are remarkable qualities of his art. *‘With the exception
of Gray” says Grierson, “English {poetry had produced nothing
since Milton that is so obviously the result of strenous and
unwearied pursuit of perfection of form.” He gave considerable
thought to the art of expression, and he succeeded in coining
phrases like “jewels five words long” — with . the dexterity of a
skilled craftsman. He spared no pains to impart the best finish
and perfection to his pieces of poetic art by revising, rewriting

( 41 )

ocigiaal gift, of Spcnsct in uniform excellence and grasp of a
huge subject, of Shakespeare in universality, in height and depth,
of Milton in grandeur and lovely sublimity; of Wordsworth in
ethical weight and grip of nature behind the veil, of Shelley in
unearthliness, and of Keats in voluptuous spontaneity, yet deserves
to^e ranked with the best of these except Shakespeare only in
virtue of its astonishing display of poetic art.”

Q. 8. Write a short essay on Tennyson as a Lyric Poet.

Or

Comment on Tennyson’s Lyrical excellence.

Ans Tennyson was by temperament a lyrical poet. He had
been endowed with all those qualities which would have made him
the supreme lyric poet of his country, but unfortunately the poet did
not strictly follow the lyric force of his genius and allowed his
lyric energy to be obscured by less vital elements. Instead of
remaining a singer voicing forth the subjective feelings that welled
in his heart, he chose to be a dramatist, a narrative poet, an
ethical teacher, and a communal bard. This association of
Tennyson with other energies (ethical, theological, didactic) along
with his lyrical energy certainly bedimmed the glory of his lyrical
genius, and made him more of a philosophic thinker than a pure
lyric poet. Had be realised that what he felt was infinitely more
important than what he thouf'hty he would have been another
Shelley or Swinburne in English lyric poetry. But Tennyson was
forced by circumstances into fifty years of unnatural objectivity.
^'He chose the easier and more prosperous course’* says Harold
Nicholson, "of becoming the Laureate of his age. He subordinated
the lyric to the instructional. His poetry thereby has lost one half
of its potential value,”

Inspite of the fact that Tennyson allowed bis lyric genius
to be dominated by philosophic thoughts, yet his lyric flow could
not be completely ebbed, and from time to time the poet
composed songs and lyrics of exquisite beauty aod loveliness. The
restraining force of caution and philosophy could not chill (jhe
ardour of his soul, and lyrics and songs continued to flow fspm
his pen right up from the age of seventeen to the ripe old age of

( 42 )

eighty. Tennyson could keep up his power for melody and song
CTcn to the age of eighty. During the long span of his poetic career
he produced such fine pieces of lyricism as Mariana^ Oriana,
Fatima^ Merman and Mermaid^ The Miller's Daughter. The Lotos-
Eaters, Break-Break-Break, The Dream of Fair Women, Lorksley
HalU The Brooke, The Splendour falls on castle walls. Tears. Idle
Tears. Come into the Garden^ — Maud, O Swallow. Swallow, Thfcse
songs and lyrics attract us by their luscious melody, their tilting
music, their Aeolic chiselling of phrase and their exquisite finish.
These lyrics are masterpieces of his genius. Commenting on the
greatness of these lyrics and songs a critic has aptly pointed out,
^^Tennyson’s genius is lyrical. He has the great gift of song,
though without the rapture that sometimes attends it. Whatever
he touches, he transmutes into a sweet melody, simple and
personal, or rich and sonorous.*’

Tennyson’s lyrics are extremely melodious and musical.
The poet has a trained and refined ear for music and metrical
harmony, and the metrical flow of his lines is completely free
from the defects of rhythm and melody. He knows the art of
harmonising the sense with the sound of the words employed in
his lyrics. Dunn rightly writes, *^He is a great poet because be is
a great artist, a master of words and metres, a maker of magical
music/'

This lyrical gift is nowhere so well employed as in giving
expression to a sense of loss, recollected after the occasion of grief,
and brooded over intellectual anguish and stoical suffering. This
feeling mingles with the voices of the sea or the mists of the air
or finds illustration in many pictures from Nature. In a more
joyous mood the poet enables us to see the idyllic side of English
life — its quite rural scenery, rich perfumes of summer or the rare
tints of autumn.

Tennyson’s lyrics and songs, inspite of all the eulogy that
they have won from critics and admirers of his poetry, cannot i e
placed in the first rank of lyrics and songs. As Albert points out,
"On the whole his nature was too self-conscious and perhaps his
life too regular and prosperous to provide a background for the
true lyrical intensity of emotion.” The lyrics of Tennyson, with
all their charm, hardly scale the radiance of a lyric by Sappho.or

( 43 )

Sophocles. They fail to move us and strike a sympathetic chord
in our heart. Even some of the lyrics of pathos and mourning fail
to move us. Oliver Elton is of the opinion that Tennyson is more at
home in classical lyrics — odelike or commemorative — carefully
concerted pieces, be the short or long wich full rolling lines than
in the briefer spontaneous kind. Rarely his songs attain the same
intensity as the songs of Burns, Scott and Shelley do. Their
pathetic strains do not move us to pity and despair. Even the music
of Tennyson’s loveliest songs is somewhat languorous. It is

Music that gentlier on the spirit lies

Thun tir'd eyelids upon tir'd eyes^

The music is a little cloying. The songs fail to appeal to
ourjfeelings. ‘*No one can dispute the feeling of Tennyson’s lyric,
but it is usually clothed in such subtle graces of fancy, in such artful
cadences, in such enamelled colouring, that it strikes the imagination
more than the heart.” Even the music fails to attract, for it
appears the music of recitation, of memory, of thought, rather than
of song. The songs of Burns as *My love is like a red, red rose’ or
*lhe devil came fidyling through the town’ are more attractive and
appealing than the songs of Tennyson. In them we feel the lack
of feeling and genuine emotion which we come across in
Shakespeare’s songs such as ‘Full Fathom five Thy Father lies’ or
“Tell me where is Fancy bred’. Tennyson’s songs and lyrics thus
fail to appeal to our heart with the same intensity and emotional
force as the lyrics of Burns and Shelley appeal us. But compari-
sons are odious. Tennyson inspite of the shortcomings in his art
is a lyrical poet and some of his lyrics and songs will continue to
provide a feast of delight to the readers for they have at least the
gift of melody in them.

Q. 9. Give a brief account of the Poetical ^nd Dramatie works
of Robert Browning (1812—89)

Ans. Robert Browning, the great Victorian poet, began his
poetic career under the inspiring example of P. B. Shcley, the
sun-treadec. His earliest work in poetry is Pauline (1833). It
was published when the poet had attained the age of twenty one.
The poem is a monologue addressed to Pauline on *the incidents

( 44 )

in the development of a soul/ It is autobiographical in tone like
Wordsworth’s The Prelude. Browning the artist and the thinker
is here veiled in embryo. The book did not sell at all and Browning,
later on, decided to withdraw it from circulation. However at
the insistence of his friends it was allowed to be in circulation and
later on it attnetod attention. Browning’s next important work
in poetry was Paraceisus (1835). It is a drama with four characters
and is, again, a story of ^incidents in the development of a soul.’
It is the study of Paracelsus, a famous chemist of the Renaissance
times, half mystic, half charlatan (1493 — 1541) who

Determined to be

The greatest and most giorious man on earth.

Through the mouth of Paracelsus Browning poured forth with
inexhaustible eloquence his own ideas and aspirations. ‘‘Paracelsus
is the victim of his high ambition, which is to attain truth and
transform the life of a man. For the sake of this ideal he commits
the blunder of rejecting emotion and eschewing love. Too late he
understands his mistake. His failure is glorious but he fails. This
enormous poem by a young man is astonishingly spirited and
deeply imbued with philosophy. As a work of art it suffers from
its very richness and redundance and from its lack of controlling
form and outline.”*

In 1840 Browning produced Sordello representing the life
of a little known Italian poet in a language and style that could
not be comprehended even by the best of literary men of the
times. Browning deals in this poem the relationship between
art and life. The poem is rich in allusions and historical referen-
ces, and some of them are so obscure that even modern scholars
with their crusading zeal for research have not been able to find
their exact source. The work failed to attract attention and was
considered a derilict in the ocean of poetry. Tennyson com-
plained that he understood only two lines of Sordello — the first,
“Who will may hear Sordello’s story told” and the last, “Who
would has heard ‘Sordello’s story told” — and that they were
both lies.

In 1842 Browning produced Dramatic Lyrics followed by
Dramatic Romances and Lyrics in 1845. In these dramatic lyrics

' Ltgouis and Cazamian : A History of Englisb Literature.

( 45 )

there more o£ artistic pleasure than was provided by Browning
in the early philosophical works of his life. Among the lyrics
of this volume the most significant arc Evelyn Hope, in a Gondola,
porhyria^s Lover, The Pied pip*»r of Hamel in. Meeting at Nighit,
Parting at Morning, By the Fireside, Home Thoughts from Abroad.

In Dramatic Romances and Lyrics the majority of the poems
are narratives or monologues including such well known poems
as My Last Duchess, The Italian in England, The Last Ride Together,
A Grammarian\s Fun*>raL Tnc H.’\aiys Tragedy, The Statue and
the Bust Hoh Cross Day.

In 1855 Browning brought out Men and Women. It was
dedicated to Elizabeth Barret Browning. In the dedication
Browning wrote :

These they are my fifty men and women

Naming we the fifty poems finished !

Take them. Love, the book and me together.

Where the heart lies let the brain lie also.

The study of human character in this volume is deep and
profound. *With keen, tireless curiosity be brings the most varied
personages to make their confessions to us, some drawn from
history, others imaginary, some good, some bad, — all unravelling,
thanks to the clear-sighted poet, the tangled skein of their emotions
and actions. Browning appears to give them wide scope and let
them say what they like but in fact he guides their confidences in
the direction of his own philosophy of energy and freedom, and
towards that faith in life, in the spiritual essence and immortality
of the soul, which is the basis of his generous optimism”*

In Dramatic Personae (1864) Browning carried forward his
study of human beings and produced a number of dramatic
monologues souch as Caliban upon Setebos, Bishop Bloughram's
Apology, Abt Vogler. Rabbi Ben Ezra, and A Death in the Desert.
These monologues arc intellectual and philosophical in character.
The lyreism of the Dramatic Lyrics is on the wane in this
volume.

In 1868—69 Browning produced The Ring and the Book.
**Hece the story of the trial of Pompilie, accused of her husband
Guido of adultery with the young monk Caponsacchi, is set forth

* L^goitit and CazimiaD ! A HifWy ef English Ltteraiure.

( 46 )

in ten long successive monologues by the principal actors, witnesses,
and bystanders in the drama. Each section repeats the story of
the same events, varying it according to the different interests or
prejudices, of the speaker; the poem shows, indeed, a startling
defiance of moderation. The repetition justifies itself by the light
it throws on the various characters and also by its psychological
purpose which is to show the distortion of facts and mocives as they
arc interpreted by a group of human beings. But it is impossible to
deny either the fault of prolixity which results from such a process
or the amazing virtuosity of the poet and the magnificent effects
he achieved in the principal depositions. ’

The last twenty years of the poet’s life were prolific in books
varying in character from Finfine at the Fair (1872) and Red
Cotton Night Cap Country (1873) to Asolando in 1889, the year of his
death. ‘^All these works” says Albert, ‘^suffer from the writer’s
obsession with thought content, and the psychologizing of his
charcters at the expense of the poetry. In too many of them the
style betrays wilful eccentricities which he had once turned to
such great account, but always the reader is liable to stumble
across passages, which, in striking landscape or lovely lyric show
that the true poetic gift is not completely absent.”

Besides composing lyrics and dramatic monologues Browning
also penned a few dramas at intervals. He brought all his
dramas in a collection known as Bells and Pomegranates*
Browning is the author of eight plays. These are, in order,
Strafford (1837), Pippa Passes (1841). King Victor and King Charles
(1842), The Return of the Druses (1843), A Blot in the Scutcheon
(1843), Colombe^s Birthday (1844). A SouVs Tragedy (1846), Luria
(1846), In a Balcony (1853).

Strafford is a tragedy in five acts, dealing with the life of
Strafford who sacrificed his life for King Charles I. The devotion
and faithfulness of this statesman arc well represented in the
tragedy. Pippa Passes is one of the finest works of Browning, It
deals with the life of Pippa, a little factory girl and the joys of
her life. The dramatic clement in Pippa Passes is very little. It
is the most unactable of Browning’s plays. But its real charm lies in
its lyric beauty, insight, idyllic charm and passion. The eotife

* Legoais and Cazamian ; A History ot Englisk Litaratura*

( 47 )

play consists of four successive episodes in each of which Pippa’s
song as she passes strikes into a fateful situation and pcecipates
the issue. One of the songs of Pippa —

God*s in His heaven
AWs right with the world.
represents Browning’s attitude towards life.

Of the remaining plays the most interesting and readable is
A Blot in the Scutcheon. The scene of this play is English and
the period is eighteenth century. It is a tragedy of love and the
basis of the play is family pride and honour. The play bears a
close resemblance to Romeo and Juliet.

Browning’s dramas did not attract much attention and are
a failure as drama. The two basic pillars of Drama are plot and
action. Drama demands a sustained plot and a rapid action.
Drama may be dehned ^as an articulate story presented in action.’
In Browning’s plays we have a story. It is articulate also, but it
is not presented through action. It is given only spasmodically
in action. Browning is more interested in the psychology and
motives of his characters than in their action. It is this lack of
action in Browning’s plays that mars their success. Browning is
retrospective, reminiscent and analytical. The presence of too
much analysis and thinking in his plays is responsible for the
failure of his dramas. **In a play which is to be seen, and where
the doing has to effect us, not the thihking, it is a serious draw-
back. Browning is not a dramatist but a dramatic philosopher.
Accept this stand point and his plays are interesting enough — some
intensely interesting, but it is at its best the interest of the study
rather than of the theatre.”* E. Albert directs our attention to
the shortcomings of Browning as a dramatist in the following
words — “Browning lacks the fundamental qualities of the dramatist.
His amazingly subtle analysis of character and motive is not
adequate for true drama because he cannot reveal character in
action. His method is to take a character at a moment of crisis
and, by allowing him to talk, to reveal not only his present
thoughts and feelings but bis past history.”

The style of Browning is also responsible for his failure as
a Dramatist. The style in his plays is terse and compact. It is

* Compton-Rickott— * 4 history of Eoglish Literaturs

( 48 )

not flexible. The simple factory girl Pippa and the magnificent
Ottimo use the English language with the same ease and fluency.
This appears unconvincing. His characters further bear a family
likenesses. They are repetitions in different forms. Browning’s
plays tend to become one-character plays. is the proverbial
predominance of Hamlet repeated in play after play.’ For all these
reasons Browning’s dramas are failures on the stage and are at
best ‘closet plays’ to be read and enjoyed in one’s private study
chamber.

Q. 10. Wve your estimate of Browning as the poet of Love

Ans. Browning is one of the greatest love poets in English
poetry. He is not concerned with divine love or the love of God,
love of country, love of family, but with only one kind of love —
the love between man and woman. He has produced a host of poems
dealing with love on the physical plain. “The love poems of
Browning” says Stopford A. Brooke, “do not mean those poems
which deal with absolute love or the love of the ideas as truth
and beauty or love of mankind or country, but it means tha isolate
ing passion of one sex for fhe other chiefly in youth whether moral or
immoral '* Browning’s poems of love give expression to all phases
of physical love varying from the fierce animal passion of Ottima
in Pippa Passes to the romantic love or Queen worship of The Last
Tide Together and Rudel To The Lady of Tripoli.

Browning’s love poetry is intensely realistic in character. A
man loves a woman not for her spiritual qualities, but for her
physical charm and passion. Browning’s heroes love their beloveds
because they are women with passion, having all the persuasive
charms of winning ladies. In short, a man loves a woman not
because she is a goddess, but because she is a real woman, “with
her curls, her dented chin, her little tricks of speech, all the
causeless laughters, the little private jokes and common memories
that arc the stuff of intimacy. That is the real thing, and in that
kind of love poetry. Browning is a master.”* Realism is the
central working force of Browning’s love poetry. The imagery of

* Grierson an.d Smith : K Critical Ulscory of Bnglish Poetry.

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hls love poetry is that of suburban streets, straws, garden- rakes,
medicine bottles, pianos, and fashionable furcoats* ‘‘Browning’s
love poetry is the finest in the world because it does not talk about
raptures and ideals and gates of heaven” says G. K. Chesterton,
“but about window panes and gloves and garden walls. It does
not deal with abstractions. It is the truest of all love poetry,
because it does not speak much about love. It awakens in every
man the memories of that immortal instant when common and
dead things had meaning beyond the power of any millionaire
to compute.” The realistic imagery of A Lover's Quarrel exhibits
Browning’s preoccupation with real things of the world.

Browning imellecmalises the passion of love. The lovers
of Browning provide a psychological analysis of their love, and this
analysing and psychologising of love is present in The Last Ride
Together and Porphyria's Lover. His lovers indulge in dissecting
and discussing their love. In Browning’s poetry of love there is
nothing of that deep, tormented, sensual strain that at once
attracts or repels in John Donne; but there is the same activity
of intellect and the same rush of thought which we come across in
poems like Twickenham Garden.

Browning mostly dwells on the power wielded by women
in sex-life. He does not emphasise the physical charms of his
women, nor does he introduce like Keats ‘light feet and creamy
breasts’ but he lays stress on the power of women to transform
and transfigure man’s life. This aspect of Browning’s women is
well brought out in By the Fire Side, Evelyn Hope and Andrea
Del Sarto.

Browning employs the dramatic method in the presentation
of his love-poems. Pure lyricism in love is subdued by the
dramatic force with which the reactions of his men and women
are presented in his poems of love like The Last Ride Together-
Most of the love poems of Browning arc in the form of
Dramatic monologues, and even the lyrics have a dramatic touch
behind them.

Browning’s love poetry is both complex and comprehensive
dealing with cases of successful as well as unsuccessful love. Of
the poems whose subject, is physical love, about two third represent
the feelings of man, and one third the feelings of woman. The

( 50 )

loT« poems thus dsel more with man’s feelings than woman’s. The
love of man is partly successful and partly unsuccessful and as
such some poems are poems of successful love, while others arc
marked with a note of despair. Among the successful poems of
love we have By the Fireside, Respectability and One Word
Maee, Poems marked with a note of failure and despair are
La^e among the Ruins; In a Gondola^ Porphyria's Lover,
A Laser's Quarrel, Love in a Life, One Way of Love.

Poems dealing with the love of women can also be divided
into two parts. (1) Successful love poems (2) unsuccessful love
poems. The successsful love poems in which women have
succeeded are Parting at Mornings A woman* s Last Word^
Any Wife to Any Husband, Count Gismond- Poems in which
women have met buffets of fortune are The Laboratory and
In a Yrar- Love poems dealing with woman’s passion lack that
width of view and intellectual power which we notice in poems
dealing with the love of men.

All love poems of Browning whether dealing with cases
of successful love or failure in love end on a note of optimism
and triumph. The triumphant note is nicely sounded in the
concluding lines of Evelyn Hope, where the old man puts a scroll
in the **sweet cold hand” of his dead beloved hoping that some
day when she awakes she **will remember and understand.” The
lover in Last Ride Together is optimistic and the poem ends on
a note of hope —

What if we still ride on, we two
With life for ever old yet new^

Changed not in kind but in degree.

The instant made eternity.

And Heaven just prove that I and she
Ride, ride^ together, for ever ride ?

Browning lays emphasis on married love and like Donne he
is the chosen poet of wedded love. This is well presented in
By The Fireside. The motto of Browning’s love poetry is well put
in the beautiful stanaa from By The Fireside — one of the noblest
and truest he ever penned —

Oht the little more and how much it is !

And the little less, and what worlds away I

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How a sound shall quicken coniem to bliss
Or a breath suspended the blood’s best play
And life be a proof of this.

Compton-Rickett has beautifully summed up Browning’s
position as a love poet in the following words — ‘^Certain aspects
of love have been mote finely rendered by other poets; but in
range of matter Browning has no superior. There are abysses of
tragic horror, agonies of sense and spirit, at which he took no
more than a glimpse. It was not in his nature to dwell on them.
His splendid vitality and buoyant hopefulness recoiled from them.
His art as a poet of love suffers limitations to that extent, but the
underlying inspiration is the greater. For his outlook on love is
the outlook of a man who puts it in front of any other thing in
life as a force for sanctifying and strengthenii^g the soul.’"

Q 11. Write a note on Browning’s philosophy of Life with
particular reference to his optimism.

Ans. Robert Browning did not belong to any school of
philosophy nor was he the disciple of any philosopher. He had
thought deeply and calmly on the problems of life, and had come
to certain conclusions about the values of spiritual and physical
life. Browning’s conclusions about life have a philosophical touch,
ar d the thinking and intellectual element in them is of a high
order. The study of his philosophic poems like Rnbbi Ben Ezra
and Aht Vogler and Asolando bring out his philosophical thoughts
in a clear and unmistakable manner. The general impression left
on our mind after reading Browning’s poems of philosophy is one
of optimism and hope. Almost all the Victorian poets bad
imbibed the despair and melancholy of the Romantic Movement
of the early 19th century. Browning was the only Victorian
poet who was not influenced by the nostalgia and despair of the
Romantic poets. Browning’s optimism was thus not epnditioned
by his age. It waa an act of faith and inner conviction with him.
*^His optimism was not Victorian; no other Victorian poet of any
significance was optimistic. The typical Victorian literary man
was either a prophet or a worrier or a doubter, and none of these
arc optimistic type. Browning blew away some of the lilies and

( 52 )

languors that the Romantic Movement had bequeathed to England.
There were, however, other Victorian poets who were determined
to bring them back.’’* It was Browning’s efforts in poetry to
keep away that melancholy and gloominess which had oversha-
dowed the minds and thoughts of his contemporaries. He was ever
hopeful and optimistic of a better order in life and a better world
to come, and it is this optimism of Browning that is the crowning
glory of his poetry.

Browning took for granted the existence and supremacy - of
God as the creator and governor of the universe, and was not
prepared to doubt the existence of God even for a moment. He
considered God as an all pervading Deity, an essence always
partially but never wholly revealed in the creative energy of
Nature and the aspirations of man. Pauline’s lover says: “I saw
God everywhere — 1 felt presence.” Paracelsus declares his faith in
the Supreme Being which, in fact, is Browning’s personal faith
about God —

Thus He dwells in all

From lifers minute beginnings, at last To man

and

God is seen God

In the stavy in the stone, in the flesh, in the soul and the cloud.

Browning did not conceive of God as a cruel and tyrannical
being unmindful of the lot of the created universe, or a sinister
intelligence bent on punishing mankind. He conceived of God
as a benignant and sympathetic power helping men in their
endeavours if they reposed faith in Him and His mercy :

God made all the creatures and gave them

Our love and our fear

We and they are His Children

One family here.

The second principle that Browning took for granted is the
immortality of the soul. He could never believe that death brings
the end of the divine spark irradiating human life. God is the
potter and the soul is the clay. Both of them endure for ever.
This faith of the poet is expressed in Rabbi Ben Ezra :

Fool I All that is at all,

* Davfd Oaiches : A Critical History of &]glisb Literature, {Volume 11)

( 53 )

Lasts ever, past recall;

Earth changes^ hut thy soul and God stand sure

Timers wheel runs back or stops : Potter and clay endnre.

Every thinker has to answer one significant question — what
is the end and aim of life ? For what objective have we been sent
to the universe ? Browning squarely faced this question. In
Paracelsus he dealt with this problem. He considered that the
aim of life was to acquire Power, and since the power of know-
ledge was the mightiest of all powers, one should pursue it with
ardour and enthusiasm. But soon he realised that mere love for
power, even for the power of knowledge, was not sufficient, unless
it was accompanied with Love. Knowledge by itself was arid and
barren unless it was joined with the force of Love. As Young puts
it ‘‘Knowledge, at first (as in Paracelsus) a glorious gift, afterwards
lost its glamour in his eyes : so far from conceding that knowledge
could serve as a channel to the Divine Mind he came to scorn it
and belittle its capacity to deal even with the primary impre-
ssions of sense ; such is the drift of those polemical poems, like
La SaisiaZt of his later years. But love, which kindles and exalts
both power and knowledge, he deems to be the quality by which
man touches the infinite, the quality common to God and man.**
Love allied with knowledge and power ought to be the main quest
of the human soul. This conviction is set forth in the words —
Love preceding power.

And with much power, always much more love.

At another place, the poet reiterated his faith in the same
doctrine by pointing out —

O world, as God had made it, all is beauty
And knowing this is Love, and Love is duty.

Browning believed that the world with all its glories and
triumphs, its joys and fears, was a fitting place for man's actions
and activities. Browning was not an ascetic who shunned the
world, nor a cross-grained man to regard the universe as a vale of
sorrow and tears, ‘where to think is to be full of sorrow; ‘where
beauty cannot hold its lustrous eyes, nor new love pine at them
beyond tomorrow.* He had a genuine interest in the world and
human life, which he considered to be real and good. “He
thought the world good because he bad found so many things

( 54 )

that were good in it — religion, the nation, the family, the social
class.”^ In Fra Lippo Lippi we are told that
This world is no blot for us
Nor blank, it means intensely and means good.

Again in the same poem we have another statement,
recognising the goodness of the world —

The world and life*s too long too pass for a dream.

In Sauh the poet says —

How good is man*s life, the mere living, how fit to employ
AH the heart and tne soul and the senses for

ever in Joy.

Haying clearly defined the goal and end of man’s life.
Browning examined whether it was possible for mao to achieve
success in the attainment of his ideals. He was confronted dire-
ctly with the problem of Evil, for every time man strove to realise
perfection and complete success in his aspirations, he was baffled
and discomfitted by the overpowering force of Evil in the world
which rctarted man’s progress. Browning, as a philosophic poet,
dealt with the problem of Evil vis-a-vis human life in which he
was intensely interested. Browning was never disheartened
by the presence and power of evil, but considered it necessary
for the progress of man in his life. Evil checked man from
attaining perfection and kept him imperfect. It was better that
man struggled to achieve perfection but could not attain it, for
perfection is stagnation and ‘what’s come to perfection perishes.’
Hence Evil provided the necessary balancing force in life and
saved man from reaching perfection. Evil was no doubt man’s
foe, but it was a foe without whose presence progress could
not have been possible. Evil was, therefore, a condition of man’s
moral life, and his moral progress. Evil was as permanent as Good
and it was man’s duty to fight and struggle agains* the forces of
evil believing like Abt Vogter that

There shall never be one lost good.

What was will live as before

The evil is null is nought, is silence implying sound.

What was good shall be good, with evil so much goa l more.

G. K. Ob0^ttT»on : Robert Browniog.

( 55 )

The presence of evil should not check man from aspiring
for higher ideals. Man’s ideals should always be higher than
his grasp. He should march steadily onwards unmindful of evil
keeping his eye on his unattainable id'.^als. In Andrea Del Sarto
Browning emphasised the necessity of keeping high ideals
in one’s life —

A man*s reach must be above his grasp.

Else, wlat is an heaven for ?

Man must struggle and strive to come as close to the
attainment of his ideals as possible. Man was sent for struggle
and fight against heavy odds of life rather than for weak-kneed
surrender before the majesty of difficulties. The poet inspired
his readers to fight and struggle rather than submit and yield :

Strive and thrive, cry speed, fight on for ever.
was Browning’s message. In Rnhhi Ben Ezra he gave the advice —
Youth should strive through acts uncouth
Towards making.

Further in the same poem he gave the exhortation —

Then, welcome each rebuff

That turns earth* s smoothness roughs

Each sting that bii*s nor sit nor stand hut go I

Be our joys three parts pain^

Strive, and hold cheap the strain

Learn nor account the pang, dar**, never grudge the throe.
Browning admonished the readers of his poetry to be warr-
iors and fighters^ strong and indomitable strugglers, nerer allowing
thoughts of cowardice and cravenness to distract them from their
chosen path of heroism and bravery. In the poem The Statue
and the Bust, he condemned cowardice and reproached the two
lovers for their lack of courage and enthusiasm in their love.

At this stage one would like to put the relevant question
concerning the utility of a life of struggle, when inspite of man’s
best efforts one was likely to fail and suffer miseries in life like
the heroes of Hardy’s novels. Browning had a satisfactory answer
to give to those who were scared of failures in their struggle.
First, a man was not judged by God by his actual attainments and
successful records. Man was judged by God by his aspirations,
his noble ideals, and bis efforts to achieve success in his life. In

( 56 )

God’s view success was not the yardstick to judge a man’s earthly
life. A man who had failed in a noble struggle was likely to be
placed on a higher pedastal in the kingdom, of God as compared
to the little man who aspired to gain little and succeeded in
achieving that little in his life. This faith of the poet was voiced
fervently in Rabbi Ben Ezra :

Not on the vulgar mass

Called ’worIC must sentence pass

Things done, that took the eye and had the price

But alU the world's co irse thumb

And finger failed to plumb

So passed in making up the main account^

All instincts immature
All purposes unsure

That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the mnn*s accouut-
Secondly, failure on the earth was not in any way an object
of dismay, for what we fail to achieve in the world, we might
succeed in heaven after the end of our journey on the earth :

And what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence
For the fulness of the day ?

Browning believed that on earth we have the ^broken arc,
but in heaven there is *the perfect round," Failure need not
dishearten us. The Lover in The Last Ride Together gives a spirited
defence of failure in life —

Fail Falone in words and deeds ?

Why, all men strive and who succeeds ?

Look at the end of work contrast
The petty done, the undone vast.

Life is a probation. Life follows life. Man’s soul is immor-
al. Death need not terrify us. What man has failed to achieve
in this world would be attained by him in the next. That was
Browning’s faith and hope in Grammarian's Funeral where he
stated :

Leave Now to dogs and apes, Man has for ever.

Such is the optimistic philosophy ot Browning. His optimism,
as G. K. Chesterton has said, "was not founded on any arguments
fot optiimism, nor on opinions, but on life which was the work
of God.” “Unlike some spiritual voyagers in out literature,, be

( 57 )

adTcr hugged the shore, but sailed for the open, loving the salt
sting of the buffeting waves. A courageous soul, and a vigorous
and vital comrade for those suffering from spiritual anaemia.”*

Q. 12. ‘‘Browning inspite of his unquenchable appentency for
('rama. did better work in his dramatic monologue than in his plays.***
(Herford) Discuss.

Or

Discuss Browning as a writer of Dramatic Monologue.

Ans Browning was a dramatic poet and during his life-
time he produced a number of plays which could not be success-
fully acted on the stage for in them the thought clement was more
prominent than action. Browning’s plays are closet plays and
can best be enjoyed in the drawing-room. The clement of action
is wanting in his plays and that is the reason why they could not
be successful on the stage. Another reason why Browning could
not succeed on the stage was that he let loose the flood of
introspection, reminiscence and analysis in his plays. His characters
indulged in psychological analysis of their motives with the result
that action was submerged in the pale cast of thought and nothing
seemed important unless it was transmuted into a philosophical
form influencing mind and character

Though Browning could not succeed in presenting actable
plays on the stage, yet it cannot be denied that he had the gifts of
a dramatist in a marked degree. The dramatic skill of the poet
was well represented in the dramatic monologue of which he
became the stipreme master. The dramatic monologue is an
instrument for presenting the incidents in the development of the
soul. It was the fitting instrument for the expression of the inner
thoughts and motives of his characters Browning’s end was the
revelation of character, of thoughts, motives and the spirit life of
man and he thought that this could best be presented directly in
the dramatic poem by catching and representing the character in
a sort of confessional monologue indulged at some high critical
moment of life. Browfling gave to the dramatic monologue a new
life force which it had not attained in the hands of Tennyson. He

* Compu n RickeU ; a History o I hi giibh i iter lure

( 58 )

made it specially his own and no one else has* ever put luch ri<ih
and varied material into it. In these monologues Browning had
the chance as Mrs. Bro Awning hinted in Aurora Leigh ;

To outgrow

The simulation of the pointed scene.

Boards, actors, prompters, gaslight and costume.

And take for a noble stage the soul itself
In shifting actions and celestial lights
With all its grand orchestral silences
lo keep tl,e peuses of the rhythmic sounds-
Having presented Browning's preference for the dramatic
monologue, let us examine some of its salient characteristics. A
dramatic monologue is a kind of comprehensive soliloquy in
which the speaker gives expression to his thoughts in the presence
of a second person with the object of convincing him of his beliefs
and convictions. The difl'crence between a soliloquy and a
monologue is that whereas in a soliloquy the speaker delivers his
own thought without being interrupted and disturbed by anyother
person, in the dramatic monologue there is always the presence of
a second person to whom the thoughts of the speaker are presented,
though the second person may not interrupt the main speaker.
*‘Some of the dramatic monologues are in the form of soliloquy,”
says Allen Brockington, "but the majority are conversational — i. e.
there are listeners and the presence of the listeners affects the talk.
Often, the remarks of the listeners are indirectly introduced or
indicated by the speakers’ answers.” In My Last Duchess the listener
is the messenger who has come to the Duke fronv another state to
negotiate about the second marriage. The Duke’s talk is carefully
calculated to impress the messenger. In Bishop Blougram*s Apology
the listener is a journalist named, Gigadibs, and the apology is
an answer to him for bis objections against the Bishop’s conduct.
In Fra Lippo Lippi, the listeners are the members of the watch
who brought about Lippo’s arrest while he was engaged in a
aocturnal adventure.

The earlier glimpses of the i Dramatic monologue are to be
found in Pauline* Here the form is hinted* It is disguised in
Paracelsus and developed in a still ;disguiscd form in Sordelh*
real beginning ofUhis form was made in the Dramaitc Lyrtes and

( 59 )

Dramatic Romances and Lyrics. Some of the outstanding dramatic
monologues of Browning are My Last Duchess, Andrea Del Sarto,
Fra Lippo Lippi, Pictor Ignotus and The Last Ride Together.

"Browning’s dramatic monologues are not written in order
to build up an atmosphere of languid sorrow or quiet determina-
tion or heavy beauty (like the monologues of Tennyson), but to
project with an almost quizzical violence a certain kind of perso-
nality, a certain temperament, a way of looking at life, even a
moment of history realized in the self-revelation of a type. The
method is not impressionistic or symbolic, nor is it really exploratory
(T. S. Eliot’s monologues, ate all three) : these are set pieces in
which a fully known character, seen in a clear light, is set sharply
before the reader,”*

In his dramatic monologues Browning portrays a wide
variety of characters drawn from all classes of life, ranging from
crooks, cowards, scholars to musicians, painters, Dukes, murderers,
cheats etc. The souls of these characters ate brought out in their
fullness in these monologues. “With keen, tireless curiosity he
brings the most varied personages to make their confessions to us,
some drawn from history, others imaginary, some good, some bad-
all unravelling, thinks to clear-sighted poet, the tangled skein of
of their emotions and actions. Browning appears to give them
wide scope and let them say what they like but in fact he
guides their confidence in the direction of his own philosophy
of optimism and freedom, and towards that faith in life, in the
spiritual essence and immortality of the soul, which is the basis of
his generous optimism,”**

These characters of Browning reveal them»clves in their
monologues and bring out the inner workings of their minds.
Cazamian calls these monologues, "studies in practical psychology”;
for they reveal a wide variety of characters and provide a peep
into their inner life.

The real poetic interest of Browning’s monologues lies in
the violence and vividness with which he tenders the impression
of a personality caught unaware. Browning aims continually at

* David Daichet: A Ciitical History of English Litaraiure (vol. II).

** LeiouifOzamian A Short History of Bngllsh 1 Iteratui a

( 60 )

the effect of impromptu. In many of the monologues there is t
mingling of the colloquial and the unusual one. The unusual
produces an effect of grotesqueness that adds life and humour to
the monologue.

The characters in these monologues believe in God and
justify their deeds and actions by attributing them to God’s will.
Sludge the Medium is certain that his life of lies and conjuring
tricks has been conducted in a aeep and subtle obedience to God’s
commands. Bishop Blougram is certain that his life of compromise
has been justified by God’s will. Andrea Del Sarto says to
his wife ;

At the end

God. I conclude, compensotfs punishes:

AH is as God over rules.

Browning’s dramatic monologues are mixtures of halftruths
and falsehoods. The characters do not reveal the full truths
of their life in their speeches. They half reveal and half conceal
truths and falsehoods. The characters do not reveal the full truths
the soul within and present their thoughts in a tricksy and subtle
style.

In the opinion of some critics the dramatic monologues arc
satires upon their characters because Browning brings out their
follies in their speeches. But this is not a just criticism. "The
great sophistical monologues which Browning wrote in his later
years,” says G. K. Chesterton, **are not satires upon their subjects.
They are not even harsh or unfeeling exposures of them. Th jy
are defences. They say or are intended to say the best that ca i
be said for the persons with whom they deal.” The Last Ride
seeks to defend the lover and his follower and Andrea
Del Sarto provides a defence of the character of the painter.

It is pointed out that Browning’s language in these mono-
logues is coarse and brutal. This is only a partial truth for there
are many beautiful passsages scattered in the monologues.

Browning’s philosophy of life is nicely brought out in these
monologues. They arc also highly suggestive in character and
provide enough scope for speculative thinking. To sum up,
**Thesc collections of Monologues form together one of the most
precious and profoundly original contributions to the poetic

( 61 )

literature of the nineteenth century. The defects which prevented
his complete success in the regular drama are not apparent in
this cognate form. He takes just what interests htm, and conse-
quently he is nearly always inspired, nearly always at his best.”*

Q. 13. Write a note on the obscurity and formlessness of
Browning’s poetry.

Ans. Browning is a difficult poet to understand and the
difficulty is intensified by the fact that his poetry is packed with
thoughts and is presented in a style that defies analysis and
understanding. Browning’s poetry appeared obscure, forml i i id
bewildering to the readers of his time and the charge of obscurity
is still levelled against the major work of the poet. The publica-
tion of SordeUo created an impression that Browning was an
obscure poet; for very few literary men could understand the skein
of tangled thought presented in this long poem. The reading
public found in this poem a monument of obscurity and diffuseness.
Tennyson railed against the obscurity of the poem by making a
statement that he only understood two lines of it, the opening line
*‘Who will may hear Sordello’s story told,” and the final, "Who has
heard Sordello’s story told.” Douglas Jarrod, who had taken SordeUo
just to beguile his time after recovery from a prolonged illness soon
put down the book in disgust and horror with the remark, "My God!
I’m an idiot. My health is restored, but my mind’s gone. I can't
understand two consecutive lines of an English poem.” All
these reactions to SordeUo clearly indicate that in this work Brow-
ning was unintelligible to the majority of his readers. This
characteristic of unintelligibility continued to be a feature of hit
later works as well and by the time the poet wrote the Ring and the
Book, he became so difficult a poet as many readers left the study
of his works in sheer despair.

It is a fact that Browning’s poems are obscure and formless.
They Cannot be easily comprehended if proper attention and care
is not given to understand them. Browning himself sometimes
could not explain the meaning of some of his own poems after
they had been composed by him. Once a student went to the

* Hugh Walker— The Victoriao Age ai Ucci.^^uir..

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poet to seek illumiaatioQ oa a certain point presented by him in
one of his poems. Browning read the poem but could not clear
the difficulty presented by the seeker of knowledge. Quite
jocularly Browning replied to the young boy, ‘‘When I wrote
this poem, two persons knew the meaning of it, God and I, now
only one of them (God) knows it.” '

Let us now analyse and examine the causes responsible
for the alleged obscurity found in Browning’s poems. Some
readers attribute Browning’s obscurity to his intellectual vanity.
This charge has been ably refuted by G. K. Chesterton who
states that there is not an iota of evidence that he was intellectually
vain. He was meek and humble, and thought that his ideas
were commonplace and could be easily understood by his readers.
He thought that “the whole street was humming with his ideas
and that the postman and the tailor are poets like himself.” To
Browning his ideas were clear and he thought that his readers
would be able to follow them. “He was not unintelligible because
he was proud,” says G. K. Chesterton, “but unintelligible
because he was humble. He was unintelligible because bis
thoughts were vague but because to him they were obvious,”* The
most obvious reason that can be pointed out for Browning’s
obscurity was the inability of his readers to penetrate through the
subtle, deep and philosophical thoughts of the poet. They were
fed on the limpid and easy-flowing poetry of Tennyson. To them
Browning appeared obscure because there was a plethora of
allusions and references in his writings which could not be easily
understood by them. The presence of too many allusions and
references in Browning’s poetry created confusion in the minds
of the readers and they (ailed to understand him in hit true
spirit.

Browning wrote too much and revised too little The time
which he should have given to making one thought clear was
used in expressing other thoughts that fleeted through his head
like a flock of swallows. His thoughts rushed more speedily
through his mind than his language could possibly express them.
His thoughts were so subtle that language could not give them an
adequate expression. He had fancies “that broke through language

*G K Chesterton : Robert Browning.

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;incl escaped,” and could not be caught by the readers.

Browning had the peculiar habit of presentin'^ too much in
too little a space. This condensation of thought was extremely
baffling to his readers and defied proper analysis and understand-
ing. The average reader could not keep pace with the subtlety of
h is thoughts.

Added to this bane of condensation and quick thought, was
the faulty grammar of the poet. He never bothered about
grammar. He followed the policy of suppressing words with the
result that many of his lines arc elliptical to a fault. He frequently
clipped his speech, giving us a series of ejaculations.

F. L. Lucas in the T en Victorian Poets finds fault with
Browning’s language. He says, ‘‘He is indeed one of those writers
who treat language not as a musical instrument, needing delicacy
no less than power in its handling, but rather as an iron bar
which they arc to twist and tangle in an exhibition of their
prowess as professional strong men.”

Browning’s style too poses certain difficulties. “He has
something to say, something of infinite moment and solemn
import but he is comparatively careless how he says it. He is the
Carlyle of Poetry, the message is everything, the verbal vesture
nothing.”

Browning need not terrify us if we approach him in the
spirit of humility and devote ourselves to his study. Behind the so-
called obscurity there is richness of thought and the reader will
be amply repaid if he devotes his time studiously to the study of

Browning’s philosophical thoughts.

Browning’s language is the fitting instrument for his

philosophical thoughts. His deep and profound thoughts could not
have been fittingly expressed in the language of a love song. The
priceless gems lie hidden behind the language that baffles the
modern readers. But it cannot be denied that the language in
which they have been couched is the proper and befitting vesture
for them. After all as Berdoe says, “Precious stones do sometimes
want digging for. Diamonds and nuggets are not always to be
stumbled across on the footpath. Pickaxes and crushing mills are
not unknown in mining operations; and the treasures of kings are
kept in strong boxes. The bee cannot gather his honey from the
simplest flower without contributing his quota to the process of

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fcr iliprtion; [and tVe stimulation of our thinking faculties is no
small part of the good which great teachers have to do for us.
The quartz will pay for crushing, the diamond for digging.”*

Q. 14. Give your estimate of Elizabeth Barret Browning
(1806 — 61) as a poetess of the Victorian Age.

Ans. Elizabeth Barret Browning, the life-partner of Robert
Browning, occupies a place of her own among the poets of the
Victorian Age. She was a few years older than her husband and
had begun composing poems, which were rather old fashioned in
form and showed a curious mingling of the influence of the Bible,
the Greeks, Byron and Shelley, In her early works, the S^rnpl.im
(1833), and Poems (1844) there is the presence of emotion and
romance though both of them are rather over-wrought and lack
the ring of genuine feeling. She later on turned with greater success
to an imitation of Coleridge in her impressions of the Middle
Ages and produced l ady Geraldine's Courtship which appears to
be the work of an artist saturated in the lore of the Middle Ages.
The influence of Tennyson’s Idylls is clearly noticed in this
work.

Mrs. Browning soon realized that she was unnecessarily
wasting her time in writing about the Middle Ages when life all
around her was rich enough to provide her inspiration for her
poetry. She soon turned her gaze to social life and produced The
Cry of Chddien which remains a poem of tender pathos and
indignation, pathos at the sad and miserable plight of the tender
children and indignation at the industrial system which
allowed the employment of children in factories. This poem is
quite in keeping with the spirit of humanitarianism prevalent
during the Victorian Age.

Mrs. Browning’s best work is to be found in her Sonnets
from the Forfui^esct a collection of love sonnets just before she
married Browning. These sonnets bring out her love for Browning
who found her ill and lonely and cured her with his tender care.
The sonnets exhibit the intensity of passion and the rapture of
love. In one of the sonnets she mentions the various ways in which
she loves Browning—

• Be' d Browning* Mesvige lo Hi Time

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How do I love thee ? Let me count the ways,

I love thee to the depth and breath and height
My soul can reach^ when feeling out of sight
For the end of Being and ideal Grace;

I love thee to the level of every day*s
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight,

I love thee freely, as men strivS for Right.

I shall but love the better after death.

<^Good as they are, these sonnets have neither massiveness
and subtlety of thought on the one hand^ noi melody and charm
on the other, sufficient to secure a place beside the greatest
poetry. But they are the genuine utterance of a woman’s heart,
at once humbled and exalted by love, and in this respect they are
unique. The woman’s passion, from the woman’s point of view
has seldom found expression at all in literature, and this
particular aspect of it never. Hence, while it would be too much
to say that these sonnets are, as pieces of poetry, equal to the
sonnets of Wordsworth or of Milton, it is not so unreasonable to
question whether their removal would not leave a more irreparable
gap in literature.”*

Though Mrs. Browning’s diction was far from pure and her
sense of rhythm uncertain, her sonnets abound in vivid phrases,
strong new images, and trenchant brevities. The narrow frame of
the sonnet kept her habitual exuberance within bounds and forced
her to submit to the discipline of this art form.

Mrs. Browning’s next important work is Aurora Leigh. It
is a fragment of spiritual autobiography and its vitality lies in its
intimate revelation of the writer’s nature, temperament and out-
look. The whole work reads like an epic. It is in fact a kind of
domestic and contemporary epic on a romantic theme. It is in
blank verse, and Mrs. Browning’s blank verse is very unequal.
Often in its extreme looseness it comes so close to prose as clearly
to be distinguishable from it. Long stretches are dry without any
beauty of form, and ar^ besides spoilt by a pedantic wordiness, a
sort of inflated utterance and affectation of masculinity. But there
are many pages where sentiment and style, alike, are admirable, in

* Quot^ by Hugh Walker in Literature ol the Victorian Eia.

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passages both of irony and of lyrical emotion. Then the verse
takes wings and soars with rare ease and with a nervous strength
that is characteristic of Mrs. Browning, showning her to be not
only original but an equal of the.grcatest. It is to be regretted
that this wide-flung and generously conceived poem could not be
sustained to the end by a firmer artistic technique.’'*

A few outstanding characteristics of Mrs. Browning’s poetry
can be gathered from her works discussed above. She is the
poetess of humanitarianism and deep pity. Her poems evoke the
chords of sympathy in our hearts and bring tears to our eyes.
Her Cowper*s Grave and The Cry of the Children are marked with
a note of deep pathos. Her love poems are rich in emotion and
exhibit the intensity of her passion and love for the poet. Her
religious poems are not successful in their efforts to fuse devotional
and aesthetic impulses, for she believes that ‘^God Himself is the
best poet, and the Real is His Song.”

Mrs. Browning’s poetry suffers from numerous short-
comings and defects. She is often extravagant and at times
hysterical. Her unchecked fluency degenerates into volubility and
many of her poems suffer from prolixity and diffuseness. "Her
poetry has none of her husband’s strength and verbal precision.
It is highly emotional, sometimes embarrassingly personal in tone
and draws on conventional poetic images and diction.”** But with
all her faults she is sincere in her utterance and genuine in her
feelings. Her poetry places her among the minor poets of the
Victorian age.

Q. 15. Give a brief account of the main poetical works of
Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)

Ans. Matthew Arnold belonged to the group of the reflec-
tive, thoughtful and intellectual poets of the Victorian age. His
poetical works are not very bulky. As early as 1849 he had pub-
lished, under the initial of his surname only. The Strayed Reveller
and other Poems^ but this poetical building was not based on a
sound and secure foundation. Later on this volume was with-
drawn from publication. In 1852 was published Empedocles on

* Letouii A Cazamlan s A History of English LHeratme.

David Dalches i A Critical History of English Litaratute.

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Etna and other Poems by containing besides the title piece,
Tristram and Isuelt, Faded Leaves, The Youth of Nature^ The
Youth of Man^ Morality^ A Summer NighU Lines Written in
Kensington Gardens^ Switzerland and other poems. This volume
was also withdrawn from publication. Then followed Poems in
1853 with a remarkable preface. It was a collection **which was
certainly tho best that had been produced by any one younger than
the two masters already discussed.*’ This volume contained
famous poems of Arnold such as Sohrab and Rustum and Scholar
Gip^y. In 1855 was issued Poems by Matthew Arnold^ Second
Series containing many old and published poems and a few new
ones such as Balder Dead and Separation- In 1858 was brought
out Merope a Greek tragedy. It was in the same line as Shelley’s
Prometheus Unbound and Swinburne’s Atlanta in Calydon, In 1867
New Poems was published. This volume contained Thyrsis^ Rugby
Chapel^ Dover Beachy A Southern Night, Ohermann Once More
and others. In 1869 was printed the first edition containing all
the important poems of Matthew Arnold.

The poems of Matthew Arnold can broadly be classified
into narrative, dramatic, elegiac and lyrical poems, besides a few
sonnets which he wrote from time to time.

Sohrab and Rustum^ Tristram and Iseult and Balder Dead
are the prominent narrative poems of Matthew Arnold. The main
elegiac poems are ThyrsiSy Rugby Chapel, A Southern Night,
Westminster Abbey and GeisPs Grave. To the group of reflective
poems belong Resignation, Requiescat, The Buried Life, Youth and
Calm, Scholar Gipsy, Stanzas — From the Grand Chartreuse and
Dover Beach. A few poems like The Strayed Reveller, Mycerinus,
The Sick King of Bokhara, Empedoclrs at Etna, Ate classical in
theme and treatment. Faded Leaves and Switzerland belong to the
group of lyrics. Shakespeare, To a Republican Friend, Worldly Piece
are Arnold Sonnets. “Next perhaps to the elegies and elegiac
lyrics” says Hugh Walker, “Arnold shows best in the sonnets.
The severe restraint of the form was hardly necessary to him, but
it suited him, and as a sonneteer in the Italian form he ranks with
the best in English Literature.”

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Q. 16 Show your acquaiutance with' the following poems by
Matthew Arnold.

^1) Strayed Reveller (2) Mycerinus (i) Empedocles at Etna
(4) Sohrab and Rustum (5) Thyrsis (6) Rugby Chapel (7) Scholar
Gipsy (8) Dover Beach (9) Lines Written in Kensington Gardens
(10) Shakespeare.

Ans. Strayed Reveller.

This long nacratiTc poem recounts the adventures of a
youth given to heady drinks in the palace of Circe, the far-famed
enchantress and beguiler of youth by wine. It belongs to the
group of classical poems, and is marked with a swiftness of speed.
"It glimmers with a golden ray of romantic splendour, sounds like
a tale told in dim Eden; appears like a fantasy king in the highest
air of enchantment. It is an example of the finest flower of the
classical edition on the lyric soil of English poetry.”

Mycerinus.

This dramatic monologue brings out the story of king
Mycerinus of Egypt, who was informed by the Oracle that
he would meet his end in six years* time. Mycerinus could
not reconcile himself to his fate for he had done no
wrong to merit so early a death. He had been a just and
good king. To defy the high handed justice of God, he relin-
quished the throne, and went to the open space of nature where he
beguiled his time in merriment and joy. Time fleeted on with its
kid-foot speed, and at last came the time when the king had to go.
He resigned himself to the decrees of fate, and met his end with
stoic fortitude. The poem ends, not in protest, but in resignation
to fate, which is a marked feature of Arnold’s classical poems.
Empedocles at Etna.

This poem recounts the life of Empedocles, a learned and
eloquent philosopher of Sicily about 444 B. C. and his suicide by
plunging into *the crater of the volcano. He muses on man’s
mediocre lot and speculates on the course of the soul after death
before j^liinging into the crater. The poem lacks action. "There is
everything to be endured, nothing to be done” in this poem, and
that is the reiison why it was withdrawn from publication.

Sohrab and Rustum.

It is an oriental tale recounting in good narrative verse the

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pathetic end of Sohrab at the hands of his father Rustum.

The fatalistic note in the poem is well marked out. Its tone of
melancholy and destiny is in keeping with the Greek view of life.
The Homeric similes constitute the main charm of this epic-
fragment. **It combines classic purity of style with romantic
ardour of feeling. The truth of its oriental colour, the deep
pathos of the situation, the fire and intensity of the action, the
strong conception of character, and the full, solemn music of the
verse, make Sohrab and Ruslum unquestionably the masterpiece
among Arnold’s longer poems.”* Some of the well known lines
of this poem are —

But yet success sways with the breath of Heaven
For we are all, like swimmers in the sea.

Poised on top of a huge wave of fate
Which hangs uncertain to which side to fail.

Thyrsis.

This fine elegy is one of the best of its kind in English
poetry. It is a pastoral elegy written on the death of Arthur
Clough. It was first published in April 1866. Thyrsis in this poem
stands for Clough, and Corydon, mentioned later on, for Arnold.
The elegiac tone of the poem is well combined with a critical note,
and in this respect it is well in keeping with Lycidas. A criticism
of Victorian materialism can be clearly noticed in the following
lines of the poem :

A fugitive and gracious li ht he seeks
Shy to illumine^ and f seek it too
This does not come with house or with goldy
With placcy with honour, and a flattering crew.

*Tis not in the world’s market bought and sold.

The poem though elegiac in tone and pastoral in its setting,
ends on a note of hope —

W/^ faintest thou ? / wander’ d till I died
Roam on I the light we sought is shining still
Dost thou ask proof? Our tree yet crowns the hill
Our scholar travels yet the loved hillside.

^The theme of the elegy is really Arnold himself, his doubts
and problems and introspective melancholy, developed indirectly

* Moody»LoveU ; A History of Eagliab Literature,

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in C0 Jikgmc context ip association with aspects of the English
landscape which ate iyi6st Appropriate to the contemplative mood/^

Rttgby Chapel.

This well known elegy» written to the memory of his great
father Dr. Thomas Arnold^ was published by Arnold in 1867. It is
a reverential tribute by a son to his worthy father. Besides eulo-
gising Dr. Arnold for his many^virtues of head and heart, Matthew
Arnold introduces his reflection on the people of the world, who
stand no a far lower level than his father. It was given to
Dr. Arnold to save the struggling followers from ruin :

Therefore to thee it was given
Many to save with thyself
And, at the end of thy day,

O faithful shepherd I to come
Bringing thy sheep in thy hand.

The generalisations of Arnold tend to obscure the object
pcrtrayed. The metre of the poem is uncouth. It is written in
unrhymed and freely cadenced verses.

Scholar Gipsy.

This poem is rightly estimated as one of the finest poems
in the English language. It was first published in 1853. The chief
source of inspiration for the poem is a passage in the book — The
Vanity of Dogmatizing by Joseph Glanvil, an English Divine,
who lived from, 1636-1680. It recounts the adventures of an
Oxford Scholar who tired of seeking preferment, joined the
gipsies to learn their lore, roamed in the world with them, and still
haunts the Oxford countryside. With this is woven a wonderful
evocation of the landscape round about Oxford and a criticism of
the materialistic life of the age. The poem represents Arnold’s
general attitude towards life and is marked with a pessimistic and
melancholy tone. Here are a few representative lines from the
poem :

Thou waitest for the spark from Heaven ; and we
Light half-believers of our casual creeds.

, Who never deeply felt nor clearly wilT d
Whose insight never has borne fruit in deeds.

Whose vague resolves never have been fulfilled
For whom each year we see

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Breeds new beginnings, disappointments new:

Who hesitate and falter life awny
And lose tomorrow the ground won to-day.

Ah, do not we. Wanderer, await it too ?

&

O born in days when wits were fresh aud dear.

And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames:

Before this strange disease of modern life.

With its sick hurry, its divided aims.

Its heads overtaxed, its palsied hearts, was rife.

Dover Beach.

This poem was published in 1867. It is a representative
poem of Arnold and is typical of his outlook on life. In this poem
Arnold gives a pointed expression to the problem of loss of faith
in the Victorian age. It is marked with an elegiac note» though
it has lyric touch about it. The poem is too ^lucidly sad* to be
regarded as a pure lyric. The following are the memorable lines
from this poem —

Ah^ Love, let us be true

To one another I for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams.

So various, so beautiful, so new.

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light.

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain:

And we are here as on a darkling plain.

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight
Where ignorant armies dash by night —

Lines Written in Kensington Gardens.

The poem was first published in 1852» and after certain
minor revisions was reprinted in 1867. The poem represents
Arnold’s love of Nature, and brings out his Wordsworthian faith
in the power of nature* In this poem the poet exhibits his
**power to draw from idyllic beauty and the common things of
earth and sky much that can comfort and exalt man’s spirit.” The
mood of Arnold in this poem is not that of a passionate and pure
lover of Nature but, *‘that of tired man grateful for a present hour
of rest and anxious lest the blessed mood depart.” The represen-
tative lines from this poem are —

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Calm soul of all things ! make it mine
To feel, amid the citfs jar.

That there abides a peace of thine,

Man did not make, and cannot mar I
Shakespeare :

This memorable sonnet pays a rich tribute to Shakespeare.
This sonnet deserves to be set as an epigraph and introduction to
Shakespeare’s own work than anything else in the libraries that
have been written on him except Dryden’s famous sentence.”*
The memorable lines of this famous sonnet are :

Others abide our question-Thou art free !

. We ask and ask— Thou smilest and art still.

Out topping knowledge —

All paius the immortal spirit must endure

All weakness which impairs, all griefs which bow.

Find their sole voice in that victorious bvow.

Q. 17. What are the main characteristics of Matthew
Arnold’s poetry ? Do you agree with the view of Mary Coleridge
that, Arnold was not a poet but a man who wrote poetry ?”

Ans. In the heyday of his glory Arnold was considered
more a critic than a poet, *‘In his verse he is a critic of life — in the
abstract; in his prose a critic of life — in the concrete; but a critic
always.”** A poet who is at heart a critic and whose poetry is
*a criticism of life under the conditions &xed for such criticism by
the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty cannot certainly be
placed in the group of poets for whom poetry is a joyful creation,
a soul-animating strain, and a spontaneous overflow of powerful
thoughts. ^‘Naturally, one who regards poetry as a criticism*
will write very differently from one who regards poetry as the
natural language of the soul. He will write for the head rather
than for the heart, and will be cold and critical ratbei; than
enthusiastic.”! Arnold is a poet who appeals more to the head
than to the heart. He was not a born poet like Shelley, whom he
criticised as an 'MnefFectual angel”, but a man who wrot^

* George Saiocsbur.? : Niueteeotb Century Literature
**Comncoo-Rickett : A History of Eoglish Literature,
t W. J. Long: Enghsh Literature.

( 73 )

for it served as a good and helpful medium of expressing his vievira
about life and its problems. Arnold’s poetry lacks spontaneity^
passion, music, rapture, qualities by which great poetry is judged.
His poetry is rich in reflective vein^ stoicism, severe austerity,
workmanship — qualities which do not entitle a poet to be placed
in the rank of poets like Keats, Shelley and Byron. Naturally
opinions do not favour Arnold’s inclusion in the galaxy of very
great poets. “Brought up under the puritanic influence of the
Bible and the hardening influence of the classics and possessing a
temperament that was stoic and sedate, calm and reserved — Arnold
lacked those finer sensibilities which alone are responsible for
quickening to birth the rapture of great poetry.”

Edith Sitwell dismisses Arnold as “an educated versifier.”
T. S. Eliot calls him “academic.” Lafcadio Hearn speaks of
Arnold’s poetry as “colourless.” Saintsbury is not prepared to
accord him a rank higher than Gray. Arthur Quiller Couch
says that “he had not the bardic, the architectonic gift.’’ All
that is said for Arnold appears to be true, for as a poet, pure
and simple, without the lyrical force and fire, and without the
rapture and exhilaration fhat poetry brings, he is to be ranked
in the group of reflective and intellectual poets rather than
poets for the masses and for the lovers of imagination, music,
lyricism and abandon in poetry. Truly it has been said by H. W.
Paul “Arnold was never popular and will never be.” He
will have his readers and admirers but they will belong to the
classes rather than the masses. Arnold, in fact, is the poet of
the intellectuals and thoughtful persons. He has a place of
honour in the eyes of reflective and cultured scholars. His
emphasis on lucidity, suavity, serenity, resignation, stoicism,
wisdom, introspection, wistful melancholy, classicism, subdued
passion, love of nature are > appreciated by those, who like him,
consider poetry not as a voice of the soul and a cry of the heart,
but as an instrument to educate the mind in a right pattern of
thought. “Deeper and deeper probes Arnold the sublime beauty
of thoughts that wake never to perish.” “With an intellectual
integrity that tolerates no shams and silliness with a calm-con**
fidence that quails not before the forces of fate and caprice o(
ch^Qce, wifb diyided opinions th^t know vs^cUUtion in the face<>f

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trial and temptations, with an analytical and introspective tempe-
rameat that weighs and considers rather than subjects itself to
the sway of emotions, with a chastened and chastening philosophy
that is born of pain and bred up in trouble, Arnold invests his
poetry with virtues and significances that appeal to the elemen-
tal and universal in man.’* With these remarks let us examine
the main features and characteristi.:s of Matthew Arnold’s
poetry.

Arnold’s 1 heory of Poetry and Poetical Ideal.

In the preface to the Poems of 1853 Arnold formulated
his theory of Poetry and enunciated his poetical ideal in unmis-
takable words. According to Arnold, the role of the poet is not
only to add to the knowledge of man but also to add to their happi-
ness. A poet is the interpreter, the consoler and sustainer of life.
To him poetry is ‘‘nothing less than the most perfect speech of
man, that in which he comes nearest to being able to utter the
truth” — To Arnold as to Wordsworth ‘poetry is the breath and
finer spirit of all knowledge.’

Regarding the subjects on which Poetry should be written
Arnold believed that “the objects of poetry are actions which
most powerfully appeal to the great primary human affections,
to those elementary feelings which subsist permanently in the
race and which are independent of time.” Poetry should have
for its treatment noble and excellent actions to be rendered in
a noble and dignified language. It is not the language or the
style that is of primary significance in Arnold’s view. It is
the plot, the action of a poem, that is of vital importance for
a poet. Arnold did not approve of Empedocles at Etna^ because
there was little action and much talk. He discarded the work,
for here ‘everything was to be cnduieU and nothing to be done.'
The action of a poem in Arnold’s view should have unity and an
achitectonic quality. It must be an organic whole in which
nothing may hang loosely, but all parts may be subordinated
to the organic conception of the poem The Greeks appealed to
Arnold in every way for, “they regarded the whole; we regard
the parts, With them, the action predominated over the express-
ion of it; with us, the expression predominated over the action.**
It is the choice of an excellent action, its treatment as a unity.

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in a sustained and dignified style that appealed to Arnold as the
befitting job of a poet.

*‘The noble and profound application of ideas to life is
the most essentiaj. part of poetic greatness. A great poet
receives his distinctive character of superiority from his appli-
cation to his subject of the ideas ‘on man, on nature, and on
human life, which he has acquired for himself. Poetry is at
bottom a criticisrh of life; the greatness of a poet lies in his
powerful and beautiful application of ideas to life — to the
question; How to live ?”* The above extract from Arnold’s
preface to the poems of Wordsworth clearly indicates that in
Arnold’s conception poetry was co-related to life and the
mission of the poet was to teach people how to live well. The
poet was not a dreamer of idle dreams and a creature of fan-
ciful imagination living in the ivory-tower of his aesthetic
conceptions, but a living being vitally interested in the problems
of life. Poetry was a criticism of life, and it was expected of
the poet that instead of merely moralising upon life or escaping
from it, he vtould penetrate into life, interpret it and colour
it by his imagination. “Not merely interpretation, but the
blending of objective life and the poet’s imagination is what
Arnold means by criticism of life.” In Arnold’s view , “poetry
is not an escape from but into life, and more of life, it is not
Lady of Shallot’s mirror that cracks the moment it is brought
into contact with reality but a king Arthur’s Ex Calihur that
sallies forth in search of adventure.”

ArnolcPs Classicism and Romanticism.

Arnold’s bent of mind was in favour of the Greeks rather
than the Romantics of his own country. “It is time for us to
Hellenise for we have Plebraised too much,” observed Arnold.
In his sonnet To a Friend he asks the question, “who prop, in
these bad days, my mind ?”, and answers by mentioning three
names — Homer, Sophocles and Epictetus, the first two being
the poets and the last a moralist. Tbc Greek poets and mora-
lists exercised a deep influence on Arnold’s mind and coloured
his thoughts and style. He chose Greek subjects for poetic
composition and rendered them with that sincerity, lucidity,

P Jiofice to Aroold's Seicciioos of Woi<hworih's Poem (1879)

( 76 )

cffaHty, anfd simplicity which the Greeks adored in their art.
Sohrab and Rustum is both Homeric in style and manner.
Balder Dead based on Norse Mythology is also Homeric in
style. The style of Thyrsis Js modelled o-n Theocritus and Bion.
Merope is a Greek tragedy. The thought in Empedocles is taken
from the Greek moralist Epictetus. The Strayed Reveller is Greek
rn theme and treatment. The theme of some of the poems is based
on Greek mythology, though Arnold’s approach to them may be
modem.- We may admit wdth Hugh Walker thiit^ ‘*the whole
sabstance of Arnold’s thought is modern,” yet it cannot be denied
that tfee poet owed his inspiration to the Greeks, and derived the
themes of some of his poems from the Greek masters. Arnold’s
classicism comes out more in the execution of his poems than in
their conception. The Greeks believed in cultivating the qualities
of lucidity, clarity, simplicity and directness. They discarded exu-
berance, richness and decorative expression. They subordinated
the parts to the w’hole. Arnold cultivated these Greek qualities in
his poetry. *‘He is Greek in his insistence that there shall be a
definite thought which shall be lucidly expressed,”* Arnold’s
poems are distinguished by clarity, simplicity, and the restrained
emotion of his classical models. ‘‘Arnold presents one of the best
examples in English of the classical spirit. He is always measured
and restrained. He detested haste, half work and disarray. Lucidity,
flexibility and sanity were the qualities he specially strove to em-
body in his work.”** “For his ideal of form, Arnold turned
usually to the literature of Greece, abjuring romantic wilfulness
and vagueness in favour of classical lucidity and restraint when he
worked more deliberately in the Greek spirit and manner, his style
was often cold and dry. In his long poems especially, he was apt
to sacrifice too much to his reverence for classical tradition.”
“Reticence not rapture, economy not exuberance, harmony not
hilarity, definiteness not dreaminess, formality not freedom, luci-
dity not lavishness are the hellenic traits of Arnold’s poetry.’'

Though there is the preponderance of classical thought
and style in Arnold’s poetry, yet it cannot be denied that the
poet is not absolutely free from the romantic hold of the poets

^ Hugh Walker : The Lfteratare 6f the VictoriaD Era.

** Moody-Lovett : A History of English LilenCora. ,

( 77 )

if the Romantic Age. Keats’ influence is clearly perceptible in
Arnold’s description of Nature. The presence of the romantic
pirit can be felt in The Strayed Reveller, Empedocles on Etna^
'^he Neckan, The Forsaken Merman, Marguerite poems.
These poems throb with the inner spirit of Romanticism. The
rtelancholy note in Arnold is in keeping with the romantic
radition. The pensive cast of his thought, now wistful, now
)ewildered is essentially romantic in origin, Cazamian notices
inner Romanticism’ in Arnold’s poetry and makes this observa-
ion, ‘‘The irony of fate has decreed that Arnold’s verse shall
ontinue to be read because of its inner Romanticism which
»reciscly was what the poet sternly tried to repress.*

Arnold’s Poetry as a criticism of Life.

Arnold believed that poetry is “a criticism of life under
he conditions fixed for such criticism by the laws of poetic truth
ind poetic beauty,” His poetry holds true to this ideal. The
prevailing mood of Arnold in all his poems is reflective and
:ritical, and his poetry is “a series of variations on the many sided
:ontcmporary conflict between spontaneity and discipline, emotion
ind reason, faith and scepticism, the rich youth and the dry age
it individual and the race.” As he believed that what Europe in
us generation principally needed was criticism, he gave thi.s
riticism in verse as well as in prose. His poetry provides a
*ich criticism* of the poets, the people, and the conditions of
lis times. In all his deepest poems, in Thyris and in the Scholar
^ipsy, in Resignation, in Obermann poems, in A Southern Nieht,
ve hear the poet passing judgment on “the life of his age, the
ite of his country, the lives of individual men.”** Goethe, Byron,
ordsworth, Shelley are all examined with keen insight and
Penetrating vision. In the Hemorial V^'rses, Arnold speaks of
ioethe, as “the Physician of the Iron age.” Byron is hailed as “the
thunder’s jcoll” and as “the found of fiery life,” Wordsworth’s
‘healing ,.^ower’ is eulogised. In The Youth of Nature,
V\ ordsworth is praised ‘as a priest to us all of the wonder and
bloom of thi5 world.’ In Stanzas from the Charrteuse, Shelley
IS represeoti^d as a poet of pain and distress, and how, ‘the breeze

' Lasouts CazamtaQ : A History of English Literature.

Hugh Walken The Uterattiraof the Victorian Eia.

( 78 )

carried thy lovely wail away, musical* through Italian trees thai
fringe thy soft blue Spciszian bay/ In Ohermam Once More.
rich tribute is paid to Scnancour, the master of Arnold’^
wiandering youth.

Arnold’s Poetry critically presents the growing craze oi
the age for material pelf and power, for riches and wealth.
Arnold’s best poetry is conceived ‘*as a battle with worldliness,
the worldliness in ourselves, and the worldliness in the world.”^
The growing conflict between science and religion, doubt and
faith is revealed in the Scholar Gipsy ;

Thou waitest for the spark from Heaven : and we
L i^ht half believers of casual creeds ^

Who never deeply felly nor clearly willed.

The same poem criticises the growing restlessness, and
worldliness among the people of the age —

Before this stranye dh ease of modern ///!?»

With its sick hurr}\ its divided aims.

Its heads over taxed, its palsied hearts was rife.

The lust for w^ealth and disdain for truth prevalent in the
age is presented in the 21st stanza of Thyrsis —

A fugitive and gracious light\he seeks

Shy to illumine : and / seek it too

*Tis not in the world* s market bought and sold.

The Scholar Gipsy is advised to run away from the hectic
life of the worldly minded people of his age —

But fly our paths, our feverish contact fly !

For strong the infection of our mental strife^

Which, though it gives no bliss, yet spoils rest,

"The Scholar Gipsy'’ says Trilling, "is a passionate indict-
ment of the new dictatorship of the never resting intellect over
the soul of modern man. It is a threnody for the lives of men
switched by modernity, of men who have become in the words
of Empedocles, living men no more, nothing but "naked,
eternally restless mind.”

Being tired of the ugliness, worldliness and the sick hurry
and divided aims, the poet seeks to retire to a monastery where he
may find peace. In t\\c Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse,, the

* H.W Garrod : Poetry and theCnUcismorUfe. p. 65^

( 79 )

poet feels attracted by the peace of the monastery :

Oh, hide me in your gloom profound
Ye solemn seats of holy pain /

Take /we, cowled forms, and fence me round
Till it passes my soul again.

He is dissatisfied with the growth of Science. Science has?
conceived a soulless universe and has been the mother of doubt,
distraction and scepticism :

Jl^ost men in a brazen prison live

Their lives to some unmeaning task-work give

Dreaming of nought beyond, their prison wall.

Democracy leaves him cold. He is critical of the grow
ing tide of democracy and the power coming to the masses. The
degrading and baneful effect of democracy is painfully presented
in Empedocles :

Great qualities are trodden down
And littleness united
Is becoming invincible.

In the domain of trade and industry Arnold again finds
the same tale, for they have brought in wealth, but allowed
happiness and health to pass off, and hence seeks the remedy
for "‘this strange disease of modern life” in the happy past,
“when wits were fresh and clear, and life ran gaily as the
sparkling Thames.” Just as the Thames symbolizes the untro-
ubled life of the past, London “wdth its ungainly spread and
sprawl, its lack of organisation, political or architectural, its
undirected expansion, its noise, its ‘mud salad’ streets, its
terrible contrasts of wealth and poverty”, epitomises the ugl>
life of .Victorian England. Betw^ecn the two worlds one dead,
the other pow’crJess to be born — “Arnold finds a w’asteland ol
a Nature, which is undivinc, blind, dying, phantom empty,
no longer capable of giving law^s or direction. Ihis land is full
of man’s senseless uproar which drowns his pain and confusion.
Arnold feels that in such a world which is without God, funda-
mentally is separated from Nature, there is nothing to bind
him to life, and strangely enough, little even to bind him to
his fellowmen.”

In short, “Blind strivings, w^ounded feet, confused alarms.

( 80 )

ignorant armies clashing by night, howling senses ebb and flow
fatigue and fever, vexed hearts, sick hurry and divided aims,casuii
creeds, the city’s jar, blind uncertainty, unspeakable desires
nameless feelings are criticised, judged, condemned/’ Arnold'
letter to his mother in 1869 is the best commentary on wha
he sought to do in poetry by way of criticism and judgmen
— “My poems represent, on the whole, the main movement o
mijCKl of the last tjuarter of a century/’

Arnold as an Elegiac Poet — His Pessimism and Melancholy

Arnold is the greatest elegia c poet oj th e yictorian age
“If I had to define Matthew Arnold’s place in poetry” say
Garrod, “I should be disposed to say of him, quite simply
that he is the greatest elegiac poet in our language, not in vir
tuc merely of Tbyrsis but in virtue of the whole temper of hi
Muse. His g enius was essentially elegiac. His poetry, profound!’
mel^chpjLyi .runs from the world, runs from it, as 1 think
hurt, hurt in some vital part. It believes itself able to sustaii
life only in the shade.”* The elegiac temper of Arnold is th
ruling passion of his life and poetry. “Nothing in Arnold’
verse” says Hugh Walker “is more arresting than its elegia
element. It is not too much to say there is no other Englis
poet in whom the elegiac spirit so reigns as it does in him. H
found in the elegy the outlet of his native melancholy of th
*Virgilian cry' over the mournfulness of mortal destiny/’*
Other poets lika Milton, Gray, Shelley, Tennyson had give
expression to their sorrow in single elegies, but no one else ha
used the elegiac form so frequently as Arnold.

Nol only are Arnold’s elegies numerous, but they als
constitute his best work in poetry. The elegies of Arnold ar
in the line of Gray rather than that of Miliun or Shelley c
Tennyson. Even the personal elegies are marked with a note c
general grief. Tbyrsis is an elegy on his friend Clough;
Chapel commemorates the death of his father Dr. Arnold, th
Headmaster of Rugby; A Southern Night is for his brother, an
Westminister Abbey is written on the death of Dean Stanley
Each one of' these elegies is of a personal character, but “eve

* H. W. Garrod : Poetry and Criticism of Life. Page. 63.

** Hugh Walker : The Literature of the Victorian Em,

( 81 )

in these instances o£ keen personal sorrow the poet widens his
view and treats of human destiny, almost as much as Gray
docs in the Elegy Written In a Country Churchyard""^

, Arnold had thus the capacity oL writing a formal or trad-'
itional elegy and of expressing.^ his elegiac mood in a poem.
While Thyrsis in the original sense and its companion poem.
The Scholar Gipsy ^ in the modern one, are his true elegies, the
other elegiac pieces ^ are what Elton calls them, As&ociatixe
Poetry wherein «the ethical and reflective element easily over-
powers the elegiac, and which circles round a place, or a
person, or both.” Indeed it is the sense of tears in mortal affairs
around him or ‘^the heart-break in the heart of things” that
pjompted Arnold to write these elegiac verses, and he could
feel one with Shelley in uttering “Our sweetest songs are those
that tell of saddest thoaght/"

Poets , learn in suffering, whether personal or imagi-
native, what they teach iq song. “Arnold’s most consistent
achievement”, observes Middleton Murry, “was in the kind which
we call elegiac. It suited best with his own persistent mood, of
ti strained grief for the life which he could not accept and the soul
which he could not make his own. Moreover, his elegiac poetry
was in keeping with a true and living literary tradition.” In
/jn/nZ/on ‘^thc unplum’d, salt, stranging sea”, in Too Late “the
lovers meet, but meet too late”, have all elegiac ring. “He is the
greatest elegiac poet”, says Garrod, “in our language; not in
virtue merely of Thyrsis but in virtue of. the whole temper of his
Muse. Hi s g enius was essentially elejjiac.” Despite the worldly
strain in him, “his Best poetry stands deliberately aside from the
world that it should be so he conceived it to be a condition of its
life. The contrast between the superficial life of every day and
the buried self of the soul is dominant in his poetry to the degree
of tyranny.”

. Arnold’s melancholy and pessimism sprang from

causes, the cHief jof; them being, ^he coiuemplation of man’s
destin y from the h^ejess jtang^le of his_own ftge, and fepm the
course of the li fe of rgprtaJl^men on the earth,” Disappointment in
love, deaths of friends and relatiycSy loss of faith in the age and

* Hugh Walker : The Literature of the Victorian Era.

( 82 )

ateyn 'all the melancholy cast of his mind were further responsible
ffor his pessimistic and melancholy outlook on life. This feeling of
misery and melancholy throbs practically in every poem of Arnold,
and can be traced to the philosophical, religious and social changes
brought about by the development of science, utilitarian philosophy
in his age, that called for a fresh adjustment of values. To the
poet the world was a vale of tears, a place to endure and to suffer.
In Dover Beach the world is represented as dreary as a desert—
/nve, let us he true

To one another, for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams^

So various^ so beautiful^ so new

Hath really neither joy, nor light, nor love»

Nor certitude^ nor peace, nor help for pain.

And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and fight
Where ignorant armies clash by night !

Man’s lot in the universe is one of helplessness, hopelessness
and despair. Man is lonely and solitary even in a populous world.
Again and again the mind of the poet turns to the loneliness
of life —

Yes ! in the sea of life enisled

With echoing^ strains between us thrown.

Dotting the shore-less watery wild
We mortal millions live alone.

Nature also suffers from loneliness.

Alone the sun rises and alone spring the great streams*

Man’s helplessness in the world is emphasised in two lines
representing *the quiet stoicism of a melancholy soul’ :

We cannot kindle when we will
The fire which in the hearts resides.

Our destiny is to spend life.

* 7/1 beating where we must not pass
And seeking what we shall not find.

In grief and despair man leads his life, without ever cicperi-
encing the glow or joy of life. In Scholar Gipsy the tragedy and
pathos of man’s lot in the universe is pathetically presented :

Ftnr whom each year we see

( 83 )

Breeds new beginnings^ disappointments new

Who hesitate and falter life away

And lose tomorrow the ground won to-day.

In another poem the miserable spectacle of man marching
mournfully to the grave is poignantly struck :

With aching hands and bleeding feet
We dig deep, lay stone on stone
We bear the burden and the heat
Of the long day, and wish it were done.

In Rugby Chapel we get a peep into the general lot o
humanity—

Most men eddy about

Here there — eat and drink

Are raised aloft, are hurVd in the dust.

Striving blindly, achieving Nothing
And then they die — perish.

Man is a puppet in the hand of Destiny or Fate. The over-
powering force of fate in human life is represented in Sohrab and
Rustum, where under the power of fate the father kills his son —

Wc are all like swimmers in the sea^

Poised on the top of a huge wave of fate
Which hangs uncertain to which side to fall.

And whether it wili leave us up to land.

Or whether it will roll us out to the sea.

Back out to sea, to the waves of death.

We know not.

The futility of Love and Ambition in human life is repre-
sented in Tristram and Iseult where the life of Alexander the Great
who died at the age of thirty two, the foolishness of conquering
empires and extending one’s kingdom is exposed.

Arnold’s Melancholy is not altogether sickening or sad. It
has a silver lining in its cloud. *‘His scepticism is not without
sunshine; his sadness not without glaclness.” He himself realised
in ld53> **the year of Crystallisation of great intellectual changes
in Arnold” that what the complaining millions of men want is
something to elevate and ennoble them — not merely to add zest to
their melancholy or grace to their dream.” The poet has thrown
hints of his cheering message in a number of poerns^ although^

( 84 )

‘*as he progressed he left poetry behind.” "The aids to noble life
are within”, he maintains in one of his poems. In another he says
"Task in our hours of insight will’d can be through hours of
gloom fulfilled”, and signals to a rising, rousing day :

Despair not thm as I despaired.

Nor be cold gloom thy prison :

Forward the gracious hours have faredy

And see ! the sun is risen !

Arnold’s Stoicism

Stoicism, as cultivated by Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius,
laid emphasis on self control, fortitude, resignation and austerity.
Arnold’s poetry was considerably influenced by the ideals of
stoicism. He possessed both the strength and weakness of
stoicism —

All pains the immortal spirit must endure.

Arnold’s stoicism is not of the purest kind. "A wistful
yearning *to make for some impossible shore,” ah agitated *stre«
tching out of his hands for something beyond, found nursing of
‘unconquerable hope’ — these arc there in Arnbld’s poetry contrary
to|Stoic philosophy. Moreover, the stern stoic demand for indifFer-
encC to pain and the fate of men is honoured by Arnold more in
its breach than in the observance. "Too sensitive to the troubles
and tragedies around him, Arnold broke down into sadness an d
burst into sobs — for himself and the world. This is not the stoic
fashion. Arnold’s sadness, therefore, makes him a loss to stoicism,
but he becomes a gain to poetry.”

Arnold’s Style

Arnold’s style is marked with lucidity, restraint and simple
grandeur. He is the master of condensed expression. "His verse
lacks movement. It is almost statuesque, because each word is
deliberately selected, each phrase finely chiselled and set in its
place. Me is a Greek in the sense he prefers simple and limpid
diction. He is classical by reason of the exquisite harmony of
tone, the measured fitness, the sweet reasonableness, the Virgilian
dignity, the unerring urbanity ai|d the liquid, clearness of style.”*

The poet’s fastidious workmanship attracts us. The many

* F t. tucas ; Tea \ icionaa Poets*

( 85 )

rhythmic felicities, with which his work abounds, please us. A few
examples of Arnold’s skilled workmanship are given by way of
illustration —

Still nursing the unconquerable hope —

Still clutching the inviolabl * shade —

•••

Who saw Life steadily and saw it whole —

< •

All pains the immortal spirit must endure.

Arnold’s Drawbacks

There are certain dravJ backs in Arnold’s poetry which lower
his position among English poets. He lacks spontaneity, rapture,
and emotional flights of imagination. ^*The urge is there to Hy,
the desire is there to soar, and the flying and soaring too
are there to some extent, but the strength of the wings
slackens ere long and the pinions flap in vain endeavour. The
poetic aerodrome of Arnold is littered with the ruins of broken
propellers and battered planes — frustrated pilgrims of the sky of
song.” Arnold has an uncertain ear for rhythm. The rush and
sweep, the swell and surge, the profuse strains of unpremeditated
art, the race of unbridled joy, the flow of notes in crystal stream,
the bursting gladness of harmonious madness, the roll, the rise,
the carol — these forever dear to Apollo, are not there in Arnold’s
poetry. He has the poet’s vision, but not the poet’s voice.
There is some lack of poetic flame in his poetry. His poetry has
*^no colour, no warmth, no leap, no passion, no rapture, and hence
according to some, fit to be read only by those who have crossed
the golden threshold of life and entered the courtyard where
leaden-ey’d despairs and pulse-less philosophical consolations sit
cheek by jowl, engrossed in mutual admiration.”

Arnold’s Place

Arnold has certain drawbacks, but they need not detract
his worth. He has certain merits and excellences of his own which
give him his place of honour among English poets. His suavity,
wistfulhess and serenity; his intellectualism and philosophical reflec-
tions; his sober and serious preoccupation with the problems of
life; his chastened stoicism; his calm and accurate descriptions of
Nature are sufficient recompense for his drawbacks. We can

( 86 )

sateiy give fiim a pretty high and permanent place in the poetic
Pantheon.

Q. 18. Write an essay on Matthew Arnold's Poetry of
Nature.

Ans. ‘‘Nature of Arnold” says Stopford A. Brooke, “is fre-
quently the nature the modern science has revealed to us, matter
in motion, always acting rigidly, according to certain way nature,
which, for want of a wiser term, we call laws. For the first time
this view of Nature enters into English poetry with Arnold. He
sees the loveliness of her doings, but he also sees her terrors and
dreadfulness and her relentlessness. But what in his poetry he
chiefly sees is the peace of Nature’s obedience of law, and
the everlasting youth of her unchanging life.” Though
Arnold lived with his father in the Lake District under
the very influence of Wordsworth, his references to Nature
lack the warmth and richness that marked the romantic
treatment of Nature. ‘This is presumably due,” as Beech says,
“to his want of enthusiasm for either science or religion, the two
main inspirers of Nature worship. One feels at once, in reading
An old, that one has reached a period of distinctly more modern
than that of Wordsworth; that the poet no longer makes these
religious assumptions in regard to the universe which were latent
in Wordsworth’s philosophy of nature. He is the least transcen-
dental of English poets; and so no German inspiration had come
in, as with Emerson and Whitman, to give a new lease of life to
Nature.”

Arnold’s reactions to Nature arc according to his varying
moods. In his early sonnet In Harmony with Nature he says :

Man must begin, know this, M^here Nature ends.

Nature and man can nevtr be fast friends
Fool, if thou const not pass her, rest her slave-
Again in his another sonnet. Religious Isolation he avers
that man must learn to play alone his religious game :

Nature* s great law, and law of all men*s minds —

To its own impulse every creature stirs;

. Live by thy light, and earth will live by hers.

jis is the scientific view of Nature in Arnold, according

( 87 )

to which Nature is just moving matter, acting on certain laws, and
in concept, ^^neither good nor evir% and thus a neutral force
devoid of any morality and indifferent to human sufferings. The
closing lines of Sohrab and Rustum wherein :

The majestic River floated on

Out of the mist and hum of that low land

Into the frosty star light, and there moved ^

Rejoicings through the hush'd Chorasmian waste.
as if no grim human tragedy has occurred by her bank, arc a
clear illustration of his scientific treatment of nature.

But at other times Arnold maintains the distinction
between Nature and man in order to exalt the moral qualities felt
in Nature above the restlessness of man. In the following lines
the poet reads a moral meaning in Nature and describes Nature
not as she actually is but what he imagines her to be. His
treatment of her becomes artistic or poetical as he follows the
way of Wordsworth :

Yet Fausta, the mute turf we treads
The solemn hills around us reads
This stream which falls incessantly
The strange scrawVd rockss the lonely skys
If I might lend their life a voices
Seems to hear rather than rejoice.

Calm soul of all things : make it mine
To feel amid the city's jars
That there abides a peace of thine
Man did not makes and cannot mar.

Blow, ye winds ; lift me with you ;

/ come to the wild ;

Fold closely^ O Nature,

Thine arms round thy child.

Yet in The Youth of Nature Arnold’s approach to and
interpretation of Nature is metaphysical and cosmological.
Coleridge’s dictum that ‘*we receive but what we give, and in our
life alone does Nature live”, is challenged by Arnold. According
to Arnold, Nature does not depend for its life upon the observa*
tion and appreciation of man; it exists independently, with a light
and glory of its own, with qualities and characteristics of its own :

( 88 )

L€^Hnes$y MagiCt and Grace,

They are here^they are set in the world —

They abide — and the finest of souls
Has not been thrill* d by them all.

Nor the dullest been dead to them quite.

The poet who sings them may die.

But they are immortal, and live.

For they are the life of the world-

“Indeed”, says Stopford A. Brooke again, ^ Arnold, was not
faithful to the scientific view of Nature. His conception of her
wavered with his mood. He, sometimes, in a sort of reversion to
Wordsworth, speaks of her as a powerful help to him.” Arnold
turns to her for the moral lessons she teaches. He contrasts her
calm with our turmoil, her rest after action with our hurry, our
confusion, nd our noise :

One lesson. Nature, let me learn of thee —

One lesson that in every wind is blown.

One lesson of two duties served in one.

Though the loud world proclaim their enmity —

Of Toil unseveFd from Tranquillity
Of labour, that in still advance outgrows
For noisier schemes, accomplished in Repose.

Too great far haste, too high for rivalry.

Yes, while on earth, a thousand discords ring
M an* s senseless uproar mingling with his toil.

Still do thy sleepless ministers move on.

Their glorious tasks in silences perfecting ;

Still working, blaming still our vain turmoil.

Labourers that shall not fail, when man is gone.

It is, thus, the one great lesson of tranquil toil, of continu-
ous work as duty that are taught by Nature to Arnold, who in
turn describes them to men. But she is very often to him an
escape, a refuge from the fever and fret, weariness and
waste of life, from “the infection of our mental strife.” In Self
Dependence he entreats the Sea and the Stars :

Ye who from my childhood up have calmed me.

Calm me, ah, compose me to the end.

Arnold is very intimate with Nature and it is this intimacy

( 89 )

that makes his descriptions of Nature vivid and true. He invests
with poetic fancy the Oxford countryside the Alpine Scenery,
the Oxus in Sohrab and Rusfum, and the Thames in Thyrsis and
mountains and meadows, all receive the magic of poetry in
such lines — “Alpine meadows, soft suffused with rain, where thick
the croous blows”, and in Thyrsis^ “Roses that down the alleys
shine afar”, or “Primroses, orphans of the flower pine.” The
accuracy of Tennyson has been greatly and fondly praised, but
Arnold does not lag him behind in the exactness of observation
and at times in the vividness of description. He is accurate not
only in respect of flowers, but even of mountains, roads, rivers,
and lakes. They are all depicted with precision and exactitude.
Here is a lovely picture of the Oxford countryside :

Screened in this nook o'er the high, half-reaped field,

And here till sun-down^ Shepherd will be.

Though the thick corn the scarlet poppies peep
And round green roots and yellowing stalks I see
Pale blue convolvulus in tendrils creep;

And air-swept linders yield

Their scents^ and rustle down their perfumed showers
Of bloom on the bent grass where I am laid.

And bower me from the August sun with shade ;

And the eye travels down to Oxford* s towers.

Arnold speaks affectionately of birds and flowers, and the
swallow, the rook and cuckoo find favour with him. The
•nightingale receives so much attention that there is one complete
poem on her — Philomela^ “the tawny-throated Wanderer from a
Grecian shore”, with “eternal passion I eternal pain.” As for
flowers the blue convolvulus, the scented poppy, the chestnut
flower and the gold-dusted snapdragon, the cowslip and the
daffodil, the white and purple fritillaries, the sweet william and
blond meadow-sweet, the May flower and the primrose, brighten
and perfume Arnold’s poetry.

It is generally the quiet and subdued moods^ the silences
of, Nature than her sounds that Arnold’s poetry treats of. Rugby
Chapel begins with “Coldly, sadly descends the autumn evening”
Md. Sohrab and Rustum with “the first grey of morning” thut
“fill’d the east^ and the fog rose out of the Oxus stream.” It is

( 90 )

rathei “mist than brightness, moonlight mote than sunlight,
twilight more than daylight” that we meet in Arnold’s poetry.

In Self Dependence tYiG sea performs with joy its long-silvered
toll. In The Scholar Gipsy there ate strips of moon-blanch’d
green, while in Dover Beach the poet finds “the turbid ebb and
flow of human misery.” In the ebb that meets the moon-blanch’d
sand, and in Tristram and Iseult the poet speaks of :

For beyond the sparkling trees
Of the castle park one sees
The bare heaths clear as day
Moor behind moor, far, far away.

Into the heart of Brittany.

The rivers like the Thames, the Nile, the Rhone, the Oxus,
the Moorshab, the Tejend, and the Helmud are introduced chiefly
to form a back-ground to his poems, but the poet endows thern at
times with a symbolism. The Oxus in Sohtah and Rustuniy a foil d
circutous wanderer”, that flows ‘through beds of sand and matted
rushy isles’, and has thus many ups and down prior to its “lang d-
for dash of waves” for “his luminous home in the star-shot Aral
S6a, is symbolic of human destiny in its various stages from the
cradle to the crematorium. That is why “0” justly asks Who
can think of Arnold’s poetry as whole without feeling that Nature
is always behind it as a living background ? — Whether it be the
storm of wind and rain shaking Tintagel, or the sea-laden water
meadows along Thames, or the pine forests on the bank of English
garden in June, or Oxus, its mists and fens and “the hushed
Chorasmian waste.”

“Arnold had Wordswonh's calm, but neither his cheer-
fulness, nor his detachment. Wordsworth lives and thinks with
the hills for his sole companions, but Arnold never rests in Nature
alone. In place of the steady optimism of Wordsworth we have in
Arnold the sense that a destiny; so rarely yielding great results as
life of man :

Though bearable^ seems hardly worth

This pomp of worlds^ this pain of births*

Arnold’s attitude towards Nature is of a great variety.
He, observes her neutrally, for she “sees man control the wind,
the wind sweep man away.” For him she possesses ' a gaiety

( 91 )

ot cheerfulness but that only intensifies the darkness and despair
of man;*fae finds her fickle and callous, hut possessing tranquil
toil and pesistent labour. He adopts both subjective and objective
attitude towards Nature, and if he enjoys on the one hand in “the
mighty world of eye and ear’* and feels Nature’s calm “aimed the
city’s jar”, on the other he maintains that she has her own loveli-
ness, magic, and grace far beyond our reach. But Arnold goes
directly to Nature so that he may enter her sanctuary:

Thus feelings gazing, let me grow
Compos* dy refresh^d^ ennobled, clear.

Then willing let my spirit go
To work or wait elsewhere or here.

Q. 19. In what way did Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861)
James Thomson (1834-1882) and Edward Fitz-Gerald (1809-1883)
carry forward the pessimistic note In V ictorian poetry ?

Ans. A careful study of Victorian poetry brings out
several strains, the chief of them being a preoccupation with
the sombre and pessimistic view of life. Matthew Arnold
stood at the head of pessimistic and elegiac poetry in the Vic-
torian age. The lead given by Arnold in this direction was
followed by a number of other Victorian poets, the chief of
them being Arthur Hugh Clough, James Thomson, and Edward
Fitz-Gerald. They laid greater emphasis on the poetry of
reason and paved the way for the intellectualisation of emo-
tional life. “It was the endeavour to intellectual ise the visions
of the imaginative life that led Arnold, Clough, Fitz-Gerald,
and James Thomson into that mood of wistful melancholy,
that crystallised soon into a more or less pessimistic criticism
of life.”*

Arthur Clough (1819-1861)

Arthur Clough, the subject pf Matthew Arnold’? elegy
ThyrsiSy was a representative Victorian poet expressing in his
narrative, descriptive, and lyrical verses, the doubts, uncertainties,
questionings, and cynicism of the Victorian age. He was, “a
half-hewn Matthew Arnold, left lying in the quarry,”**

• Comptoo Rickett : A Hisioryof boglish Uffraiurc
** F. L, Lucas : i en Victorian Poets

( 92 )

He was the "truest expression in verse of the moral ana
intellectual tendencies, the doubt and struggle toward! settled
convictions of period in which he lived.”* His entire work in
poetry is intellectual in character and is marked with introspec-
tive self-analysis and self-delineation. It expresses with great
sincerity the spiritual unrest corroding his spirit, and his futile
attempt to restore faith and hope in an age of doubt and
disillusion.

Clough’s first work The Bothie of Toher-na Vuobct is a
narrative poem in hexametre and deals with the problem of women
in Victorian society. It is marked with a humorous fancy, and
deals with the vital problem of woman’s emancipation in a
light flippant tone. It suffers from a certain roughness
of artistry.

Clough’s second poem Amours de Voyage is a represent-
ative poem of the age, and exhibits the doubts and uncertainties
of the period in which he lived. Its hero Claude is a miniature
Hamlet, and his strong resolves are sickled over by the pale
cast of thought. The poem stands as a landmark of the age
characterised by paralysis of action through doubt, and lack of
real purpose brought about by the conflicting claims of religion
and science to hold the day in their power.

Clough’s Dipsychus is a remarkable work in the field of
pessimistic and melancholy poetry. It depicts the conflict
between science and religion, and throws a flood of light on the
doubts and conflicts marring the life of the people of the age.
The purpose of Dipsychus is "to depict a spirit divided against
itself in its battlings with good and evil, pleasure and pain, faith
and doubt, and all the most complex problems of life.”** The
spirit of this poem is carried forward in a number of smaller
poems such as The New Sinai, Qui Laborat, Orat, Easter Day and
Naples* We prefer to him in his mood of frank cynicism and
religious agnosticism.

Thou shalt have one God only, who

Would be at the expense of two ?

No graven images may be

* Lowell : A, U. Clough.

** Hugh Welker ; The Litentuie of the VicUHlan Ere.

( 93 )

Worshipped^ except the currency

Thou shall not kill; but needst not strive

Officiously to keep alive (The Latest Decalogue.)

“Clough’s lyrics of doubt and worry remain more inter-
esting than their intrinsic poetic worth would warrant, for,
though he never found a really adequate poetic form for his
anxieties and uncertainties, he did speak out about his intellectual
predicament to a degree that none of his contemporary
poets did.”*

Clough tried to come out of the swirling current of
pessimism and uncertainty as can be noticed in his self-comforting
and hope-inspiring poem Say not the struggle nought availeth,
but he could not be successful in his attempt. The overpower-
ing force of despair at the loss of faith could not make him
another Robert Browning in the age. He remained a half-hewn
Matthew Arnold. “The views of modern life, of its complexity
and the paralysis of action it produces, which we find in
Dipsychusy are also to be found everywhere in the poetry of
Arnold. Both are poets of doubt ^vho would fain be poets of
faith. Both have to rest content*'^ mainly with negations; but
notwithstanding the negations, each preaches a gospel of courage
and of work.”**

James Thomsoji (1834-1882)

James Thomson was a minor poet of the Victorian age.
He drifted from middle-class hedonism to nihilistic despair.
Thomson’s earlier poems, such as Sunday at Hampstead and
Sunday up the River, “show a relish of the humbler pleasures of
life expressed in an -unpretentious verse form and language which,
while using something of the conventional poetic vocabulary of the
dayjhavc an appealing brightness and a simplicity.” His most fam-
ous work in the field of pessimism is The City of Dreadful Night.
The whole work is saturated with atheistic despair. In varied
stanzas and verse forms, the poet presents a despair which is Very
much different from Tennyson’s Blegy. The movement of the
poem is deliberately lithargic, and its imagery has the stifling
effect of a nightmare. The concluding vision of “Melancholia”

f^avid Daichesi: A Critical History of EDgUsb Literature^ Volume. II
^ ** Hugh WaUwr : 1 ho Uteratuioof the Victorian Era.

( 94 )

is the nightmarish vision of a sick Englishman. The late
‘Isomnia’ achieves a similar mood and there is, mpre of th
cumulative effect of despair in this portion than in any othc
Ijait of the poem. The thesis built by the poet in this poem i
.that. '^Life is a hell and progress an illusion.’*

Idnard FitzGerald (1809-1883)

The early years of FitzGerald’s life were spent in tran?
lating the works of Calderon, Aeschylus, and Sophocles. IJ
made no attempt at literal translation, and added something t
the original verse from his store of imagination. By cutting an
ca :\ ing, omitting and adding, he failed to preserve the spir..
,of the Spanish and Greek dramatists.

FitzGerald’s most ambitious work is the translation of
the Ruhaiyats of Omar Khayam, the eleventh century astronomer
poet of Persia. The work is his standing title to immortality.
FitzGerald tried to keep to the spirit of the original work in
his translation, though he varied the theme according to the
needs of the Victorian age.

The entire work is marked with a note of pessimism
and despair. It lays emphasis on the power of destiny in
human life. Its ruling passion is the power of fate that Matthew
Arnold had so powerfully brought out in Sohrab and Rustunu
The moving finger writes and having writ moves on. All our
tears and prayers are of no avail for not a line of destined fate
can be erased by human efforts. Man has to surrender piti
fully to the power of fate. In such a state of life where much
has to be endured, the best way out of the stew is to cat, drink,
and be merry without caring for the future :

Unborn tornorrow and dead yesterday

Why fret about the.n if to day be sweet 7

In this poem Fitzgerald lays emphasis o« hedonism
grounded on scepticism. He advocates a life of sensual pleasure
with undertones of philosophic searching and echoes of gnomic I
wisdom. We find in the whole work ‘a remarkable texture ot|
sadness and sensuality, of disillusionment and carpedienim*

Theie is an oriental-cum-Victorian atmosphere in
poem. “The poem moves with a slow music, the oriental n
providing a slightly exotic flavour and at the same time helpi^^l

( )

to suggest the urbane sophistication, of Ecclesiastes. A sense
of the evanescence of life and fleetness of the passions comes
throught all the advocacy of wine, women, and song, in an
atmosphere of drugged and pleasing melancholy. It is a
Tennysonian rose and garden and moonlight, but the oriental
atmosphere, the sophisticated questioning of fate, the slow, incan-
tatory march of the quatrains, give the poem a flavour of its
own. Yet it is very Victorian both in mood and in poetic appar-
atus, and akin to the Victorian elegiac mode that we have
discussed.”*

Q. 20. Write an essay on Pre-Raphaelite poetry.

Ans. The Pre-Raphaelite movement during the Victorian era
was an idealistic reaction against the didacticism, moral fervour,
and pre-occupation of poets and novelists with contemporary
society. In the reign of Queen Victoria there was a growing
tendency to make literature a handmaiden of social reform and
an instrument for the propagation of moral and spiritual ideas.
Literature became the vehicle of social, political, and moral
problems confronting the people of the Victorian age. Ruskin,
C-arlyle, Dickens were engaged in attacking the evils rampant
in the society of their times, and even poets, who ought have
cared more for art than propaganda, were not free from the taint
of the age.

It was against this preoccupation of poets, prose writers, and
novelists with the mundane problems of their times, that a set of
high-souled artists formed a group in 1848 called the Pre-Ra-
phaelite Group. The original members of this group or brother-
hood, were D. G. Rossetti, Holman Hunt and J. E. Millais, and
later it was joined by William Morris and A. C. Swinburne. All
the members of this brotherhood were repelled by the .sordidness,
ugliness, and materialism that had taken hold of the minds of
the leading Victorians. They . sought to escape from this
world of vulgar realities, to a land of beauty, art and loneliness,
where they could satisfy their urge for art and creation of
beautiful things. All these Pre-Raphaelite poets sought refuge
in the romance and mysticism of the Middle- Ages, and their

* David Dsiches : A Critical History of Fogiisb Liteiature, Vdioine il.

( 96 )

6yes were constantly ' on the past rather than ^on the festerlni^
sores of their own times.

Originally it was a movement tor the regeneration of
painting on the models of the early Italian painters. Being dissa-
tisfied with Raphael’s loftiness of conception and perfection
of technique, they thought of the early Italian painters
having simplicity and natural grace. They, in fact, wanted to
encourage originality of conception and freshness of execution,
which Raphael discouraged. These young painters with a determi-
nation to break away from stereotyped traditions in painting set
up by Raphael returned to the earlier painters of Italy whose
works satisfied them with their freshness and freedom. They
identifted themselves artistically with the painters before Raphael,
the early Florentines e. g. Giotto, Bellini for they found in the
work of these artists an individuality and sincerity alien to the art
of Raphael’s successors. They gave themselves this name
because they drew inspiration from Italian painters before Raphael,
in whom they found a sweetness, depth, and sincerity of devotional
feeling, a self-forgetfulness, and humble adherence to truth, which
were absent from the sophisticated art of Raphael and his succe-
ssors. The movement though originating in the laudable attempt
of reviving simplicity, freshness and freedom in painting,
soon extended its bounds to include the revival of poetry and
sculpture on the same lines. It was joined later on by Morris and
Swinburne, and became a full-fledged organisation for the revival
of art in its varied aspects. The leaders of the Movement sought
to achieve in art and literature what Newman had tried to do
in the church. In this v/oy the Pre-Raphaelite Movement suppor-
ted by Oxford men became the child and heir of the Oxford
Movement.

In the sphere of poetry the Pre-Raphaelite poets did
remarkable work. Their poetry had certain common characteristics.
The poetry of the Pre-Riphaelitc poets — Rossetti, Morris,
Swinburne — was a revolt and reaction against the conventionality
of poetry represented by Tennyson. The poets of this school
revolted against the idea of harnessing the use of poetry
the service of social and political problems of the age. Tennyson
concentrated on the social, reitgous and political life of the ag<^-

( 97 )

It was against this age-bound poetry that the Pre-Raphaelites
raised their revolt and introduced the new standard of the glorifi-
cation of art rather than the glorification of the fleeting and
temporary values of mundane life.

**The Pre-Raphaelites were above all artists. Art was their
religion”, says Legouis. They were the votaries ot art for art’s
sake. They had no aim save to burn incense at the altar of art
and worship art for its own glory. They had no morality to
preach and no reforms to introduce through the medium of their
poetry. Love of Beauty was their creed, and if in glorifying
beauty they had to be sensuous, they feared not the charges of
the moralists and orthodox puritans. They aimed, both in
poetry and painting, at perfect form and finish. “A strong con-
ception of scene and situation, precise delineation, lavish imagery
and wealth and detail are their distinguishing characteristics.”

To escape from the darkness and ugliness of contemporary
society, they turned their eyes to the good old days of medievalism,
when chivalry and knighthood, adventure and heroism were in
the air. Rossetti was the hero of this return-back to madievalism
for poetic inspiration. His poems The Blessed Damozel and Sister
Helen are medieval in outlook and form. The symbolism of the
Medieval days is well reflected in them. The other members of
the school. Hunt and Mallais were a little sceptical of the
medieval traditions, but Rossetti had peculiar fascination of the
romance, chivalry, superstition, mysticism of the medieval times,
and his poetry is rich in recapturing the medieval spirit in poetry.
In fact, the Pre-Raphaelite poetry is a continuation of Romantic
poetry headed by Coleridge and Keats particularly in the revival
and glorification of the Middle Ages.

The Pre-Raphaelites were pictorial artists, and their paint-
ings as well as poems, in fact, were symphonies in colour. Their
works appear to be rhythmic pageant of colour. Pictures are drawn
with the richness of a painter’s brush. Rossetti’s poetry is the
most poetical of the Raphaelite poets. He felt in pigments. He had
the unfaltering touch and the observant eye of a meticulous painter.
He even surpassed Keats and Tennyson in pictorial scenes in
poetry. The Pre-Raphaelites painted their pictures as in frescoes
or mosaic work finishing each portion with elaborate care. ^‘Every

( 98 )

Pre-Raphaelite landscape background” declared Ruskin, “is painted
to the last touch in the open air from the thing itself. Every Pre-
Raphaelite figure, however studied in expression, is a true portrait
of some living person. Every minute accessory is painted iii the
same manner.” The Pre-Raphaelite poets gave special care to
the presentation of elaborate and precise details. They painted
every blade of grass and every part of human body with scrupu-
lous care and precision. It was this loving lingering over every
detail of the body that exposed them to the charge of
‘fleshliness’ from Robert Buchanan. They could not possibly keep
away from elaboration and every picture is marked with the
precision of a scientist and a realist. In The Blessed Dumozeh
Rossetti lingers over details and provides an elaborate picture ot
the lady as ‘she cast her arms along the golden barriers and laid
her face between her hands.’

Pre-Raphaelite poetry is rich in melody. The free flow of
the swift moving lines is remarkable in Swinburne. He ss the
supreme melodist among the Pre-Raphaelit?e poets. The flow of
musical language in Swinburne is racy and profuse, and with
him we seem to be gliding in a river of music and melody.
Vowel calls to vowel and consonant to consonant, and these links
often seem stronger than the links of thought and imagery.
Atlanta in Calydon h rich in melody. The ode — The Hounds of
Spring — has not been surpassed in melody. Each stanza of this
ode is a masterpiece of musical harmony. How cunning the
differences in speed are rendered in the musical lines
The wild wine slips with the weight of its leaves
But the berried ivy catches and cleaves
To the limbs that glittery the feet that scare
The wolf that foliowsy the fawn that flies.

Sometimes the Pre-Raphaelite poets sacrificed sense at the
altar of sound. This is a standing charge against Swinburne’s
poetry. Often in Swinburne words and phrases are employed for
musical effect without adding to the sense or meaning of
the lines.

The poetry of the Pre-Raphaelites is marked by sensuousness.
Rossetti’s poetry is sensuous and passionate. While Shelley and
Browning gave sensuoui-ness to feelings Rossetti gave sensuous

( 99 )

expression to thought. ‘^He valued the physical expression, the
outward manifestation; not as does the mere sensualist as some-
thing disconnected from the inner life, but as the visible sign of
the invisible power that moulds life and character into beauty and
nobility.”

The Pre-Raphaelite poets were considerably influenced in
their art by Keats and Tennyson. The movement was a direct and
legitimate development of the Romantic Revival. The debt which
they owed to their predecessors was amply repaid by leaving
behind a rich harvest of poetry for the delight and pleasure of
posterity.

Having examined the leading characteristics of Pre-Raphae-
lite poetry let us now briefly review the special contribution of each
one of the Pre-Raphaelite poets to the poetry of this school. The
leading spirit of this school of poetry was Dante iGabriel Rossetti.
In his poetry are embodied all the essential characteristics that
marked Pre-Raphaelite poetry. The spirit of art finds its best
exposition and expression in Rossetti’s sonnets and ballads. His
cult of love and beauty, his appreciation of colourful pictures
rich in sensuous appeal, his artistic portraiture of life in its lovely
aspects make him the supreme exponent of art during the nine-
teenth century. He carried forward the creed of Art^for Art’s
sake in the painting as well as poetry. Rossetti’s poetic world is a
rare world of mystery, wonder and beauty. It is far removed frona
the hectic world of sordidness. It is a shadowy world lit by another
light than the light of common day. In his poetry we get the
flashes and glimpses of that unearthly spirit which haunts
Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner^ and that magical touch which is the
crowning glory of Keats’s La Belie Dame Sans Merci. “The
Renaissance of wonder” says Theodore Watts Dunton “culminates
in Rossetti’s poetry as it culminates in his paintings.”

Pictorial paintings formed one of the special charms of
Pre Raphaelite poetry, and Rossetti’s poems are rich in pictorial
suggestiveness. The poet revelled in colours and his outlook on
life was that of a painter. He thought and felt in pigments. Only
a painter of the first water could have given us lines like these
from the Blessed Damozel--

( ion >

Th^ blessed Damoz?l : leaned out

From the gold bar of heaven

i . &

And the souh mounting up to God

Went by her like thin flames^

The lines are pictorial, and they could have bev^n composed
by no one save a Pre-Raphaelite artist. The deft hand of the artist
is again clearly perceptible in A Last Confession. It is the story
of a murder, and the red colour of blood gleams through the poem
from the very start, where the man finds the child on the hills
and she tells him how her parents had left her and walked into the
“great red light” down to the catastrophe when, “sea and sky
were blood and fire and all the day was one red blindness.”

The medieval note in Rossetti’s poetry is again a prominent
note of Pre-Raphaelite poetry. In his works we come across the
mysticism, the romance, and the superfiaturality of the Middle
Ages. His subtle imagination could spin the gossamer web of
glamour and fantasy as can be seen in' My Sister's Sleep. The
supernatural atmosphere of the Middle ’Ag6s is Vividly caught in
Rose Mary and the whole poem is rich in the mystical supernatur-
alism of the Middle Ages. In Sister Helen, the power of medieval
magic is presented with vigour and force. The fact is that,
“Supernatural was an article of his imaginative creed; the concep-
tion of it affected him profoundly and he had an almost childlike
relish for supernatural situations” (A. C. Benson).

The mystic suggestiveness of Rossetti’s poetry^ is dgafn in line
with Pre-Raphaelite poetry. Rossetti had tire power of fifipressing “
the imagination by lines of splendour and magnificence suggesting *
some half expressed thought, some dimly shadowed emotion. We *
come across many suggestive lines of beauty and mysticism in his
poetry. The suggestive value of such lines as quoted below is
inestimable :

1. Girt in dark growths, yet glimmerin g with one star

2. Words whose silence wastes and kills.

3. The spacious vigil of the stars.

The sense of vastness and immensity is suggested in several
Tines of the Blessed Damozel. The mystery of life is exquisitely

( 101 )

and yet mystically suggested in the following lines f;*oin The Sea
Limits :

And all mankind is thus at heart
A ot anything but what thou art
And Earthy Sea, Man are all in each,

Rossetti^s poetry has been exposed to the charge of volup-
tuousness and sensuousness bordering on sensuality. Robert
Buchanan characterised Rossetti’s poetry as belonging to the ‘A jshly
school of poetry.’ In his view Rossetti’s luscious pictures and
voluptous scenes were no better than the work of a sensualist.
It is a fact that some of the poems of Rossetti such as Troy Town
and The Mouse of Life are not without the taint of flcshliness. But
Rossetti did not consider it an evil to present rich and cloying
physical pictures, for “the senses were for Rossetti sacramental
emblems of the spirit. He valued the physical expression, the
outward manifestation not as does the mere sensualist as something
disconnected from inner life, but as the visible power that moulds
life and character into beauty and nobility.”*

Viewed from this angle the charge of sensuality and
fleshliness cannot stand against his works. Rossetti did not
glorify senses for their own sake. The body and the soul were
united for him, and the spiritual was approached through its
bodily manifestation.

“Profound thinkers and more varied singers the last
century has given us hut Rossetti has expressed, in a way no
other poet has done, the hunger of the human heart for love and
beauty, the hunger of the human soul for those impalpable
mysteries that touch the horizon of human thought.”**

Among the little band of followers that clustered round
D. G. Rossetti in the earlier part of his career, was William
Morris, who signalised his career by writing a number of poems,
short and long, in which the aspirations and hopes, longings and
wistful gazings of Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood were nicely
presented. Morris was at heart an artist and remained an artist
'^hroughout his life. “The very worst of his writings bears upon
it the unmistakable hallmark of the “artist, the poorest of his

Compton-Rickett : A History of English Literature.

' A. C, Henson : Rossetti.

( 102 )

singing robes will have some gold feather clinging to it that shows
what paradisal floor it lately swept”* As a poet and an artist in
verse, the interest of Morris lay in the past rather than in the
sojdidness of his own times. His Guinevere and other PoemSy
Jason and E rthly Paradise reveal his love for the Middle Ages.
The Haystock in the Flood presents the passionate and savage side
of medieval life with truth and power. In The Life and death of
Jason we have the finest pictures of the Middle Ages in their
heroisni, supernaturalism, witchery and magic. “Morris turned to
the Middle Ages not as a mere aesthetic seeking an enoydne, not
as an aesthetic scholar composing skilful exercises but as a
child turns to the fairy land.”** Morris was equally interested in
Scandinavian Sagas and Norse Stories. His Sigurd the Volswi};
is an epic of the old Northern warriors who had defied death
and fate.

Morris’s love for the past and his disgust with modern times
is brought out in Earthly ParadisOy a collection of twenty four
romantic narrative poems in classical or medieval themes. As we
go through the poem we are transported lo an enchanted region, a
world of beautiful illusions, where everything is bathed in the
atmosphere of magic, supernaturalism and shadowy unreality.
The ‘idle singer of an empty day’ (Morris) creates for his readers
a world of enchantment and beauty, where everything is suffused
in the light of witchery and romanticism.

A. C. Swinburne carried forward the tradition of Pre-
Raphaelite poetry. His subjects were derived from romanticism,
medievalism, and his hatred against conventional morality.
Swinburne gave a touch of sensuousness to poetry and the poems
included in Poems and Ballads (1866) were coloured by sensuous
tl rughtb and expressions in which the Pre-Raphaelite poets found
special delight. The Garden oj Proserpine is marked with sensu-
ousness. “Never since Venus and AdoniSy Hero and Leander, and
the Son^s and Sonnets of 'Donne had the passion of the senses
been presented with such daring frankness as in the Hymn of
Proserpine and other pieces.”t Swinburne’s poems broke in upon

• F. U Lucas ; leo Victoriao Poets

•• Alfred No^cs: William Morris (E. M. L.)

t Grieiaon and Smith; A Critical History of English Poetry,

( 103 )

Victorian reserve, and his sensuous pictures shook the generation.

Unlike other members of the Pre-Raphaelite group
Swinburne was a musician rather than a painter. 1 Le made
poetry musical rather than pictorial and brought to it the gift
of lyricism and melody. He carried the prosody of the Romantic
Age to its extreme point of mellifluosness robbing the ilybla
bees of their sweetness. *‘Just as Rossetti made thought pictorialiy
sensuous, Swinburne has made thought musically sensuous. He
is not merely melodic — Shelley was gloriously melodic — he is
harmonic. Shelley’s music is the music of the lute; Swinburne’s
the music of a full orchestra. His melodies are rich and complex
with a sweeping grandeur that no other poet has equalled, much
less excelled.*

The Pre-Raphaelites rendered a distinct service to art by
insisting that it is wo/ the business of the artist to instruct or to
solve social problems. But their complete withdrawal from contem-
porary life into mere sensuousness and decorative beauty left their
experiences and their poetry thin and bodiless. Their aesthetic
goals influenced the symbolist poets.

Pre-Raphaelite poetry had its day during the life time of its
exponents and practitioners. But as time advanced, charges of
decadence began to be brought against this type of poetry and
it was asserted that the poets of this school in divorcing themselves
from the life around them and in building for themselves an
ivory tower of art, beauty and sensuousness were guilty of
leading men and women to a world of etfiminacy, morbidity and
shadov/y unreality. It was pointed out that the Pre-Raphaelite
movement ‘*was an unfortunate thougu potent influence/’
unfortunate in the sense that it exercised an enervating influence
on the healthy morality of the Victorians, and potent in the fact
that it turned the thoughts and minds of the poeple of the age
from sordidness to beauty, enchantment and loveliness. Inspire
of« all the opposition against the tide of Pre-Raphaelicicism, it
could not be completely stemmed; and the rumblings of the
movement continued to be heard in the poems, dramas, and
Action of Oscar Wilde. But gradually and gradually the oil
that kept the flame of Pre-Raphaeliticism burning was spent, and

• ComptOQ-RfckeU ; A History of English Literature.

( 104 )

the whiff of realism and materialism that came in the wake ot
the twentieth century, blew off the candle of Pre-Raphaeliticism
leaving behind the smoke, that too trailed off in thin flakes
leaving no trace behind. The early years of the twentieth century
sounded the death knell of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, .and
vith the coming of Robert Bridges ana John Masefield on the
poetic stage poetry took a new turn and heralded the birth of a
new age.

Q. 21. Give an account of the main Poetical works of Dante
Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882).

Ans. Dante Gabriel Rossetti was tha main moving figure
of Pre-Raphaelite poetry. He started his career as a painter,
and soon drifted to poetry. He made his early contributions to
the short-lived Pre-Raphaelite periodical The Germ (1850; and
to the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine (1856). These early
poems which later on were published in the volume Ballads and
Sonnets (1881) are noted for their medieval tone, religious
mysticism and interest in the works of pictorial artists like Ruskin
and Tennyson, Among the poems of this period the Blessed
Damozel is rightly considered as a repesentativc poem of the
great artist. In this poem arc brought out his poetic gifts
at their best. "‘Here his gifts arc fully displayed : a gift for
description of almost uncanny splendour, a brooding and passi-
onate introspection, often of a religious nature, and a verbal
beauty as studied and melodious as that of Tennyson-less certain
and decisive perhaps, but surpassing that of the older poet in
unearthly suggestivness.”* The poem exercises a fascinating
influence on the minds of the readers. "‘Inspitc of an occasional
false note, it is a finely wrought poem in a mode that is not
really either Kcatsian or Swinburnian nor truly Dantesque
cither, for that matter, for the disposition of the emotion is
altogether too self-conscious.

Rossetti produced his remarkable sonnet sequence in The
House of Life, It is a fine collection of one hundred and one
sonnets. Most of the sonnets of this volume are tedious.

* E, Albert : A Histoiy ot English Literature
t David Patches : A Critical History of English Literature.

( 105 )

Individual sonnets, no doubt, exhibit power and passion, but
his habit of constantly Platonizing, and equating the physical
passion with the vaguely spiritual aspiration is exasperating in
the extreme.

Rossetti wrote a few ballads in his life time the chief
of them being Rose Maryy Troy Town and Sister Helen. In
these ballads he catches the spirit of the Middle Ages, and
introduces a touch of mysticism and sensual imagery, fusing the
physical and the spiritual in a remarkable manner. His words
convey his meaning as ether conveys light.

This poet of mysticism, symbolism and medievalism
signalised his career by writing at least one tale of realism as well
viz. Jenny in two hundred octosyllabic couplets describing the life
of a London prostitute in her London lodging and concentrating
mainly on her exhausted and wearied out existence.

Rossetti produced a few dramatic monologues in the style
ot Robert Browning. A Last Confession is a fine dramatic
monologue in which an Italian patriot makes a confession to a
priest how he came to murder the girl he loved. The poem
reminds us of Browning’s Porphyria^s Lover.

Rossetti also left behind a few lyrics and narrative poems
vhich exhibit his gifts in a marked degree.

Q. 22* Give your estimate of D. d* Rossetti as a Poet of the
Pre-Raphaelite School.

OR.

^^Rossetti was the nineteenth century spirit of art embodied.^’
(Hugh Walker) Discuss.

Ans. D. G. Rossetti was the leader of the Pre-Raphaelite
school of poetry during the Victorian age. He was primarily an
artist, and devoted his muse not to the service of social reform
and democratic freedom, but to the progress of art and the ador-
ation of beauty. He carried forward the creed of art for art’s
sake, and instead of making his poetry as an interpretation of the
life around him, concentrated on the visualisation of the life of
the Middle Ages, bringing in his sweep all that the Middle Ages
stood for — passion, love, mysticism, asceticism; symbolism siud^^
superstition.

( 106 )

Rossetti was the poet of love and passion par excellence
combining in a strange manner physical passion with spiritual
love. "For Rossetti love is an ecstasy, sensuous and not yet
wholly of the senses; at times it has the comprehensiveness of a
mystical religion when the loved one seems not as herself alone
but as the meaning of all things that are.”* He presented this
mystical and spiritual aspect of love in Blessed DamozeU bringing
out the mystical love between a lover on earth and the blessed
Damossel in heaven. In jthis poem there is the combination of
physical passion and spiritual love.

In Sister Helen Rossetti concentrated on frustration and
disappintment in love. The sonnets in The House, of Life signa-
lise love in its glory as well as desolation. He combines spiri-
tual and sensuous aspects of love in his sonnets. In describing
love he uses Christian symbolism and at the same time a deeply
sensual detail to indicate the union of spirit and matter, soul
and body. "It was Rossetti’s early study of Dante which familiar-
ised him with the symbolising and sacramentalizing aspect of the
medieval mind, and his own temperament also encouraged a ten-
dency to identify the concretely physical with the permanently
spiritual.”**

Sometimes the physical and sensuous side gets the upper
hand in his description of love, and then it appears that Rossetti
is the poet of the ^fleshly school of poetry,’ which Robert
Buchanan had coined for denouncingr Rossetti’s voluptuous and
sensuous tendencies. Many poems of Rossetti are no doubt
fleshly and have an excess of voluptuousness in them. The Bride^s
Prelude, The Stream*s Secrets, Troy Town arc frankly sensuous,
and the excess of sensuousiie^s in them makes them sensual*
They are overwrought and luscious in their effect.

Why did Rossetti allow sensuality and voluptuousness to
come in his poetry ? There is a reason for that. The poet did
not consider it an evil to present rich and cloying physical
pictures; for the senses were foe him sacramental emblems of the
spirit. "He valued the physical expression, the outward mani-
testation, not as does the mere sensualist as something disconnected

* GriersoD and Smith : A Criticai Histof f of bi gltsh Poetry.

*** David Dai ches : A Critical History of English Literature (Volume 11).

( 107 )

ifom the inner life, but as the visible sign of the invisible power
that moulds life and character into beauty and nobility.”* The
body and the soul were united for him, and the spiritual was
approched through its bodily manifestation.

Rossetti like Coleridge, was essentially the poet of the
Middle Ages. *‘As a mediaevalist Rossetti is obviously in congen-
ial surroundings for che mingled warp of sensuousness and
supersensuousness so characteristic of the Middle Ages suited to
a nicety of his peculiar genius.”** In Rossetti’s poems we come
across the mysticism, the romance, and the supernaturalism of
the Middle Ages. My Sister*s Sleep reveals the rich store house
of mediaeval romance. The supernatural atmosphere of the Middle
Ages is vividly caught in Rose Mary. In Sister Helen the poem
of mediaeval magic is presented with vigour and force. The
mystical aspect of supernaturalism, so very common in the Middle
Ages, is presented in Love*^ Nocturne which is Tennysonian in
its languid dreaminess. Supernaturalism of any kind had a great
hold on Rossetti, and he captured its different shades and forms
in his poetry. “Supernaturalism was, so to speak an article of
his imaginative creed; the conception of it affected him pro-
foundly, and he had an almost child-like relish for supernatural
situations.”^

Rossetti was one of the most successful pictorial artists
in poetry and painting. He revelled in colours. He thought
and felt in pigments. Only a painter could have given us lines '
like :

The blessed Damozel leaned out
From the f^olden bar of heaven
And the souls mounting up to God
Went by her like thin flames.

The red colours of blood gleams in the story of murder
embodied in A Last Confession. It is in this poem that we came
across the familiar lines of Rossetti —

The sea and sky were hlood and fire
And all the day was one red blindness.

Cc mpton-Rickett : 'A History of tegiish Literature
** F. Elbert : A History of English Literature,
t A. C. Bensoo : D G. Hocsetti.

( 10 « )

Rossetti’s poems arc rich in symbolism and mystic
suggestiveness. He had the power of impressing the imagination by
lines of splendour and magnificence suggesting some half-expressed
thought, some dimly shadowed emotion. The suggestive value
of such lines as —

Words, whose silence wastes and kills

&

The spacious vigil of the stars^
is really very great.

Rossetti was at heart a mystic, and his mysticism is well
brought out in his poem. Sometimes his pictorial mysticism
led to mere archaism or mere verbal dissipation, but some-
times it achieved remarkable success as in the inimitable ballad
Sister Helen. Rossetti had neither the religious mysticism
of his sister, nor the spiritual mysticism of Tennyson, but it
was ‘*thc mysticism of the artist with its fascination for the half-
lights, for the undiscovered countries of thought and feeling.”

In his style Rossetti was gorgeous and decorative. His
early poems are simple and direct in expression, but his later
productions after 18V0 became decorative and complicated in
style. These poems of his later years are full of literary
artitice sometimes degenerating into literary trickery.

He had one great defect. He could draw images with a
painter’s eye, but he sought to reduce everything to an idea or
eiscnce. “It is the element of thought and even abstraction, the
attempt to reduce everything to an idea or an essence, that is
more ^characteristics of his poetry. Indeed, the chief fault of
Rossetti’s poetry is its reductivcncss. It is this that makes his
remarkable sonnet sequence The House of Life in the long run
tedious.”*

ftossetti may have some defects in his poetry as a thinker
but lie has all the virtues of an artist. “Profounder- thinkers,
and more varied singers the last century has given us, but
Rossetti has expressed, in a way no other poet has done, the
iiuQger of the human heart for love and beauty, the hunger of

>* David Datches : A Critical Hisior.? of hngli>D Literature.

( 109 )

the human s >ul for those impalpable mysteries that toueft the
horizon of human thought.’’*

Q. 23. Write a note on the poetry of Chriistina Rossetti
(1830 — 1894), and compare her Mith her brother Dante Gabriel
Rossetti.

Ans. Christina Rossetti occupies a distinctive place in
mid-Victorian poetry. She belongs to the group of the Pre-
Raphaelite poets, and it was her mission as a poetess to keep
alive the spirit of simplicity, lucidity and spontaneity which the
movement had inspired. She was a Pre-Raphaelite to the back-
bone and remained so throughout hei life. ‘^Her brother and
Morris deserted the creed of their youth; Swdnburne never really
held it; Christina Rossetti, except when she was mesmerised by
Tennyson or carried away by her generous admiration for Mrs.
Browning, kept the Pre-Raphaelite faith to the last. And she w’as
not only the truest Pre-Raphaelite of them all; within her
narrower range she was a better artist in words than any one of
them.”**

Though Christina Rossetti lived in the Victorian age, yet her
temperament was hardly Victorian, and she did not employ the
Victorian poet’s professional tricks in her works. By temperament
she was a woman of religious faith, ^^nd if she had been born
in the seventeenth century, she might have been another Herbert
or Crashaw. ‘‘She might have done better in the seventeenth
century, when her strong religious feeling might have found itself
less at odds with the world she lived in and less restrictive of the
total personality.”f

Her poetic output is slender, and like that of Coleridge,
can be bound in a few volumes. Her major single works are
Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862) A Pageant and Other
Poems (1881) Time Flies (1885) Verses (1893) Sing Song (1894)
Vcw Poems published posthumously in (1896). ‘'In Goblin Market
she uses allegory with an unforced directness that is unusual in
post-medieval English Poetry. The Princess Progress^ an allegori-

Compton Rickett : A History of English Literature.

** <irierson-Smith : A Critical History of English Poetry,
t David Daiches : A Critical History of English Literature.

( no )

cat narrative poem nore serious in tone and more comprehensive
in meaning is somewhat more laboured^ but it possesses neverthe-
less something of the grace that characterise her best poetry. The
series of sonnets Monm Innominata are of more biographical than
poetic interest; all except the final sonnet in the sequence have a
certain thinness that is the most conspicuous fault of her weaker
poetry.”

Christina Rossetti is at heart a religious poetess and her
title to immortality lies in her devotional and religious verse.
“In the age of steam she remained like some quiet anchoress of
the Age of Faith — one who has sat to Giotto or knelt before St,
Francis of Assissi.”* On religious themes she wrote with a
transparent simplicity of tone and language and a great variety of
metrical and melodic effects. Her religious imagination and her
steady Anglican piety dominate her poetry. Her lyrical poems,
such as From hfou^e to Home, suggest the religious poetry of the
Metaphysicals, and hers is the greatest body of religious verse in
English poetry since Herbert, Crashaw and Vaughan. “Her
peculiar originality as a religious poet lies in the fact that unlike
the majority of religious poets, she is no way concerned with
preaching to others or moralising for others, or dealing with the
intellectual difficulties that beset faith. She believes and worships.
Her entire attitude is that of a worshipper, and in the moods of
awe and ecstasy, she certainly has few rivals.”**

Christina Rossetti is an ascetic in her attitude towards life.
She advocates renunciation of the worldly pleasures, and an
abnegation of the sensual joys that entice the soul and bind it to
the wheel of the world. But she is not an ascetic of the type of
Diogenes who had given up the world and sought to live in a
tub. Her asceticism *‘is not that of the bloodless soul of one in
whom love and living arc withered up, but of one who has all
the capacity ijpr enjoying the sensuous delights of life, yet has
deliberately put them aside, and turned her gaze skywards, from
choice.*^'^

• F. L. Luca« : Ten VIcTorian Poets.

** Compton-Rickett : AHistorv of English Literature,
t B. Albert : A History ot English Literature.

( 111 )

The world could not hold her in its grip, she chose to

be an ascetic, rather than an epicurean in her life. Her poetry is
marked with melancholy and sadness, and the shadow of death
constantly haunts her verses. The futility of life and the evanes-
cence of the fleeting glories of the world form the subject matter
of many of her poems. Death j^nd shadows and the spirit of
Pulvis et umbra, mar her verses and add a poignancy to her
soulful utterances. Her most touching poems of death, sadness.,
and grief are When I am dead, my dearest. We buried her amony
the flowers. Too late for love. Too lote for Joy and Dream-land.
Her poetry is one long wail of grief and despair, of the coming
premonition of death, and the burden of life hanging on her
heart. She gives out the mournful sigh —

Time flies, hope flags, life piles a wearied wing;

Death following hard on life gains ground apace^

Though the recurrent note in Christina Rossetti’s poetry
is that of sadness and depression, yet her work is not oppressive.
There is no morbidity in her spirit. She accepts the sadness ot
life and lives on without fretting and fuming about her lot. Her
poetry does not weigh upon the spirit as do the lines in The City oj
Dreadful Night, “So exquisite is her art, so subtle her sense of
beauty, that the insistent minor fascinates us rather than depresses
us, and we are distracted from her melancholy matter by her
charm of manner, partly also because she does not strive or cry’
does not wail or repine, but accepts the pain and sadness of life as
she finds it, aud though at the opposite pole of thought from
Fitzgerald, yet like him expresses in consummate art, her tempe-
rament and outlook.”*

There is a note of supernaturalism and love for the Middle
Ages in her poetry. This note binds her to her brother D. G.
Rossetti and other poets of the Pre-Raphaelite school. Her
Goblin Market and The Prince's Progress are steeped in medieva-
lism and supernaturalism. Like her brother she successfully treated
^upernaturalism in its fantastic and eerie aspects.

Christina Rossetti had the gift of singing and the lyricism
her verse is delightful Her lyrical poems exhibit at times a
quietly luminous clarky^ aad a heart touching quality. In her

* Compton Rfckdtt : A History of Eoflish LiisfiUttce,

( 112 )

lyricism she achieves a simplicity that came nati rally to her,
without any effort.

Her style in poetry is simple and direct. “Her style is one
of the simplest ever used by an English poet, her brother's often
rich to gorgeousness. Hers is pure with the purity of clear spring
water, his like a draught compounded by some cunning alchemist
charged with all fragrance and flavours."* Some of her poems
for children have delicacy and charm, and delight us by their
simplicity, nobility and sincerity of uttrance. She is a great
minor poetess of the Victorian age.

Q. 24. Write a note on the poetical works of William
Morris. (1834-1896).

Ans. William Morris was one of the greatest Pre-Raphae-
lite poets of the nineteenth century. His poetry is steeped in
medievalism and is mostly narrative in character. The Defence
of Ouenevere and Other Poe/ns (1858) is medieval in subject and
studiously Pre-Raphaelite in style. The influence of Tennyson’s
fd Us of the Kin^ is clearly perceptible in this work. The difference
in the treatment of the same subject by Tennyson and Morris lies
in the fact that whereas Tennyson treated King Arthur and
Gucneverc as Victorian characters, Morris gave them the
character of medieval people. In Morris there is nothing of that
tone of modernity which characterised Tennyson’s art. “But
Morris does not present his medieval world as a world of merely
languorous beauty, and when he brings forward his sordid traitors
and grim avengers he can produce, as in The Haystack in the
Floods verse narrative of power and even horror.”**

The Life and Death of Jason (1867) is very much different
from the first volume. In this work, covering nearly eighteen
books, Morris takes us back to the heroic exploits of Jason in
search of the Golden Fleece. Here we pass from the world of the
Holy Grail to the world of the Golden Fleece, The treatment of
the myth is medieval. It is penned in the same defuse, soft-
coloured gently flowing verse in which the Norman French trou-
vercs had sung the adventures of their knights and paladins. It

• Hugh Wa»kcr: The Literature of the Victorian Age.

David Daiches : A Critical Hisioryof Rnglish Literature, VolumelL .

( 113 )

liovcs with an easy grace. It is the first of a long series of narrative
poems which forms the bulk of his contribution to literature. In
these he is neither dramatic nor lyrical. He is a narrative artist
following in the heels of his master Chaucer, though lacking the
discipline and irony of the fourteenth century narrative poet.
‘^Whatever defects the poem may have, it is limpid and pellucid as
a brook. Here and there the water runs thin and shallow, but
it is not necessarily the less beautiful for that. Its bed is, for the
most part, bright with exquisitely coloured pebbles, and occasio-
nally with really precious stones.”*

The Earthly Paradise (1870) is a collection of twenty
four tales, some in heroic couplets, some in octosyllabic
couplets, and some in rhyme royal. All these stories are
set in a frame work that takes us away from the world of
modern life. In the narrative prologue The Wanders^ the poet
furnishes the background and the framework of the whole
book. We are told how a group of fourteenth century ‘‘gentle-
men and mariners of Norway”, come at last after a lifetime of
adventures by land and sea, to an island where they come across
the last survivors of ancient Greek civilization. Thus the medieval
Norse world and the ancient Greek world come in contact with
each other and the two groups narrate stories, half of them
medieval and half of them Greek. The metre is a delightfully easy,
limpid, decasyllabic couplet; the diction has little of the magic of
his early lyrics, but is invariably well in accord with the subject.
Even if the characters are shadowy, they arc at least beautiful and
romantic shadows. “The tales themselves are on the whole
prolix, the narrative bubbling on without adequate concen-
tration, but the interspersed poems describing the different
months of the year and providing an appropriate emotional
situation for each are done with an almost Keatsian richness and
beauty.”** The whole effect of the Earthly Paradise is, “that of
an immortal palace of art, down whose golden corridors, hung with
unchanging tapestries and eternal dreams," perpetually passes a
pageant of human pleasures and pains land fears.”f The material

* Alfred Noves : William Morris (E M* L. Series).

** David Daiches : A Criticil Historjof English Literatuce, (Volume II)
t Alfred Noyes : WHUsm Morris (E. M. L. Series).

( 114 )

world vanishes, to be replaced by‘a vision of beauty composed of
joy and sadness; the whole thing is artificial although the setting
is that of nature; its contour^ may be definite enough, but the
atmosphere is mysterious and misty. This magic touch of the
modern impressionist in Morris sets his tales in a totally different
sphere from that of Chaucer.”*

Morris’s next work Sigurd the Volsung is Scandinavian in
character and is a masterpiece of narrative art. It is the crown
of Morris’s work. The poem recounts the adventures of Sigurd,
the Norse hero. The story of his chivalry and savagery is narrated
is the trampling measure invented by Morris for the narration of
his vigorous tales. The entire work is composed in a line of six
beats in rising rhythms with freL|uent anapaests and extra mid line
syllabic.

The later works of Morris were inspired by his socialist
faith. The Pilgrim of Hope (1885-83) is a modern story of
struggle espousing the cause of the people and is told for the most
part in the same verse form which Morris had employed in
Sigurd. Chant for Socialists (18S5) is socialistic in thought, and
two poems of this volume All for the Cause and The March of
the Workers are remarkable for their socialistic thought. The two
romances The Dream of John Ball and N^ws from Nowhere are
socialistic, in thought, and depict an ideal society based on the
principles governing More’s Utopia.

These poetic works of Mortis present him as a Pre-Raphae-
lite, medievalist, romantic storyteller, lover of the fierce Norse
legends, socialist worker and fighter, and a vigorous propagandist
for socialism and for the Arts.

Q. 25. Give yonr estimate of William Morris as a
Pre-Raphaelite Poet.

Ans. William Morris belonged to the group of the Pre-
Raphaelite* poets headed by D. G. Rossetti. He was essenti-
ally an artist, though in his later works he employed poetry as an
instrument for social emancipation and amelioration of the
down-ttodden classes. He co-telatcd art to life in ‘his later works,
particularly in Poems by the Way, where he pictured an age or

I-tgouis ftod CazemiftD : A History of Coglish LittiAturCi

( 115 )

a Utopia when, “Capitalism shall be abolished, and dignity and
freedom return to the lives of the workers, who will inherit an
earth beautified by Naturejand Art and ask no ocher paradise.”
Art for him was, “never a luxurious toy but an ethic, a creed
for the betterment of the whole community.”* This conception
of Art was developed by Morris at a later stage in his life as a
poet. The zeal of the aesthete developed into the fuller passion
of a social creed.

The earlier work of Morris reveals him a Pre-Raphaelite
poet. “In him Pre-Raphaelitism is coloured by a nature whose
instincts are more broadly English than in Rossetti. His imagi-
nation fills out the frail forms characteristic of primitive
painting; he delights in unfolding broad canvases where languor-
ous effects are bathed in an atmosphere of serenity. He is of
the lineage of Spenser not of Keats in his co-mingling of
virile strength with the greatest refinement of touch.”**

The Pre-Raphaelitism of Morris is best reflected in his
love for the Middle Ages and the Scandinavian sagas. He turned
to these periods to find relief from the drabness, the ugliness and
the greediness of his times. He found solace and relief in
them and he cast his gaze to the fairy lore of these romantic
periods in world’s history. His Life and Death of Jason fl867)
is medieval in conception and execution, and Sigurd the Vofsung
(1876) is Scandinavian in character. He was fascinated by the
warlike savagery, violent passion and heroism of the Norse
heroes, and he gave fine expression to their militant feelings.
He became a romancer of the Middle Ages and the Scandinavian
life. The love of adventure and the attraction of an imaginary
world, where beautiful human lives bloom out in open nature
and unrestricted liberty, led Morris to narrate the lives and deeds
of his warlike heroes with gusto and enthusiasm.

Morris is a great narrative poet, and as a teller of tales
in a bewitching style there is hardly any poet to be placed by
his side except Chaucer and Byron who, of course, were
superior to him in the narrative skill. The stories of Earthly
Paradise reveal Morris as a narrative poet. Morris had the

Comoton Ricketf : A Hi itoiy ot English Literature

Legouis and Caz^miao : A History of English Literature,

( 116 )

gift of narration but was deficient in Chaucer’s realism and sly
humour. His stories give the impression of remoteness from
actuality, and create the atmosphere of magic and mystery. The
magic touch of the modern impressionist in Morris sets his tales
in a totally different sphere from that of Chaucer. He is in fact
the "dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time” and "the singer
of an empty day.”

Morris’s poetry reveals him a pictorial artist of a high
order. He had the deft skill in painting scenes or rather
weaving picturesque scenes in poetry. His works abound in rich
descriptions of nature and human life. His landscapes are
rich in colour and tonal effect. Like Rossetti, Morris had the
artist’s passion for beauty, which is best reflected in his English
landscapes and the rich tapestried descriptions of his narrative
poems. His landscapes are imbued in romantic colours. They
all seem to weave themselves into a vast tapestry, an ornamental
decoration of artistic beauty, wrought by an ; imagination that is
enthralled by the phantasmogoria of the ages. "The poetry of
Morris” says Caaamian, "is for the most part a succession of
pictures forming vista of great and seemingly inexhaustible
wealth. They arc drawn from every point of the human horizon,
from the past as from the present; but perhaps mostly from the
lands of legendary or mysterious beauty; from the fable and
from classical antiquity, above all from the chivalric tales and
adventurers of the Middle Ages, for those were the times of his
heart’s desire, and modern civilization is blotted out in the
pictures of the world of to-day, to allow us to see only the fresh
green, unchanging countryside.”

Morris was a craftsman of a high order. Throughout his
life his poetic imagination inspired his craftsmanship and his
craftsmanship materially affected his poetry. "Morris’s aesthetic
delight in the manipulation of his materials, his delight in the
Middle Ages as a kind of wonderland, his delight in beautiful
fabrics, the thin green gowns that are worn by the Greek girls,
the jewels, the precious metals, the colours — all this belongs to a
craft unknown to Chaucer.”*

Morris’s craftsmanship is best exhibited in the manipulation
* Alfed Noes : WiUiam Morris (E. M. L. Seim)

( 117 )

o£ the verbal melodies of his verse. His poetry is rich in
harmonious and cadenced song, the variety and suppleness of
which is quite in the style of Chaucer and Spenser. He pours
out his poetic inspiration in innumerable rhythmic forms with
w'onderful ease, smoothness and facility. Blank verse and
rhymed verse are all united in one absorbing music. There is a
fascinating spell in his music which awakens and soothes the
pensive yearning of the soul.

“If we deny Morris a seat on Parnassus as a supreme
poet, he would claim supremacy, assuredly as a great artist who
wrote verse as one of many media for expressing his innate sense
of beauty. And if not one of the topmost peaks he certainly
belongs to the heights. There is no poet whose work is so uni-
formily fine in .quality, so happy in its level excellence.”*

Q« 26. Give an account of the main poetical works of
A. C. Swinburne (1837-1907).

Ans. Algernon Charles Swinburne “was the spoilt child
of the Pre-Raphaelite group, at once its prodigy and its emba-
rrassment.” Unjike the other memb«s_ of , the group w.as -a
irmsician jathcr than a painter. The poetry of Rossetti and Morris
is^ primarily pic torial , buf the poetry of Swinburne is pre-eminently
the poetry of a melodist. Swinburne’s poetry lacks firm contours
and sure outlines. The sonority of the rhymes or of the modula-
tions is that which links the verses together.

-All the poetical works of A. C. Swinburne including his
dramas are rich in melody. F ^tn his y outh onwards Swinburne
exhibited an unheard of skill in versification, a gift for imitating
the most wid ely differ i n g rhythms, not only those of English poets,
but also thosc"^r the Latin, French and Greek poets. All his
works arc extremely mellifiuous, and tl^ lines ring in our ears.

T he first fruit of bls^genius in which melody reaches a high
V* ate rmark is Atlanta in Calydgn , a trage dy^in the classical style.
The subject of the tragedy is t he hunti ng of the wild boar in
f alydon, the l ove of Melegar for the maiden huntress Atlanta
‘ind his death at the .hands of h is mothe r. “The action moves
with stately swiftness, in obedience to the strict canons of Greek

Compton Rickett : A History of Eogikh Literature.

( 118 )

form; the pathos is deep an d genuine, and the music especially in
the c horus es is splendid in range and sweep.” Though the jtra^edy
is classki^l in conception and theme, yet it is saturated with
Tomantic spirit, and in the opinion of Hugh Walker, "it could
have been written in an age of rotnance and by a writer
deeply under the influence of the romantic spirit.” The lyricism of
the odes in Atlanta in Calydon particularly the Hounds of Spring is
enthralling and captivating. "The language is altogether more
open-worked than it ever is in Greek tragedy, but the metrical skill
and the splendour of passionate suggestiveness so characteristic
of Swinburne’s best verse help to disguise this from the casual
reader. Though Sw inb urne is working under more self-discipline
here than he does in his later poetry, there is already in Atlanta
that grandiloquent scattering of language which sounds as though
it is saying more than it is. The choruses, done in a. variety of
meters, show Swinburne experimenting in the intoxicated swing
which was to be the mark of so much of his later poetry.”*

After Atlanta Swinburne penned a few more dramas, the
chief of them being Both Well (1874) Mary Stuart (1881) Locrine
(1887) and The Sister (1892). Tl^y are all tragedies. In these plays
there is more of sound and speed than action. They are wanting
in characterisation and self-restraint. They suffer from difFuseness
and over luxuriance of lyricism which are the bane of the drama-
tist. These tragedies of Swinburne lack the primitive force of the
great Elizabethans. They have but few lifelike characters and too
many "megaphones” for the author. There arc few scenes which
make an appeal to the emotions. The scenes cannot be put up on
the boards for there is more of ranting than normal action in them.
In one of the scenes John Knox is permitted to indulge in a long
harangue consisting of four hundred lines. His speech is marked
with difl'useness In fact, difFuseness serves Swinburne ill in the
drama. Swinburne met the same fate as Bro wning in his dramatic
productions. Each failed in this literary form though th^ieasans .
for their failure as dramatists, were different. "Bach failed for
opposite reasons; Browming because he was too mjich^f the
psychologist; Swinburne SecauseTiie was too little. Browning ana- ,
lysed his creations, whenli’c¥ho uld ha^TIIustrated their characters

• David Oaicbes : A Critical History of eogli^h Literature, Volume il.

( 119 )

in action symthctically; Swinburne rhapsodied about his characters
in place of letting them speak for themselves. But in neither case
can the literary student afford to neglect the dramas. If
Browning’s are more interesting intellectually, Swinburne’s
are richer in fine poetry.”* ,

Swinburne at once shot into the limelight when his frankly
pagan collecti on of poe ms was j^uBHshed under the title Poems
and Ballads This volume came like a bombshell into the
Nfc^rld of Victorian prudery, and shook the moralists of the age.
The v iolent paganism of the poems broke in upon Victorian
reserve, and opened n ew vistas of sensuous delights for the readers.
Sensuality, in th ese poems, ha s d efinite sadomasochistic oyertoncs.
Passion has been expressed without reticence The poems give a
fillip to the cult of Ven^ as opposed to the cult of the ‘pale
Galilean.’ There was an outcry against these poems, and Swinburne
was branded as a sensualist. But the poet was hailed by young
enthusiasts and hot blooded youths as a poincer in the new field
of youthful poetry. “A^dmirers went down on their knees in
drawing-rooms and adored the poet, while bands of undergraduates
linked arm in arm startled the staid streets of university towns
with the chanting of those unspeakable stanzas. Swinburne had
made his name with a vengeance.”**

Swinburne would have produced still greater poems of
sensuousness if he had succeeded in his love with Jane Faulkner
who was fascinated by the fragile little poet with his red aureole
of hair and his birdlike fluttering ways. The jilting attitude of the
lady disappointed the poet and he felt no urge to write poems of
romanticism and pagan voluptuousness. He expressed the frust-
ration of the moment in the following lines :

Let us go hence, my songSy she will not heavy
Let us go hence together without feavy
Keep silence now y for singing time is over.

Swinburne’s poetic career would have been nipped at this
critical period, if his friends had not come to his succour; and
invoked bis admiration for Mazzini, the Italian patriot. The poet
was roused from his supine passivity and started composing

Compton- Kickett . A History of EngKsh Literature.

** P. L Lucas : Ten Victorian Poets*

( 120 )

poems of political and patriotic fervour. He abando ned
pass ionate p oetry for the poetr 2 _ of liberty and _ pa^triptism,
and published the new o^shoots of his newly awakened
enthusiasm in !iongs befoi^ 5 ««rfr e (1871). The poems of this
volume represent a turning away from dangerous personal
themes to celebrate and encourage the fighters for liberty
and political independence in Europe especially Italy. He
is never more eloquent in his passion, more orchestral in his
music than when singing of Italy and of her struggle for freedom.
Songs before Sunrise is his central book. “Other books are books.
Songs before Sunrise is myself” observed Swinburne. It is his
central book because besides the lyrics of liberty, he presents his
conception of the universe in the poems which may be associated
with “Hertha.” In the poems of this volume Swinburne cheers
the readers by his adoration of liberty and by upholding the ideal
which John Stuart Mill had advocated “On Liberty.” All the majn
aspects of Mill’s essay are developed in the Songs, “admiration of
the Greek world; doubt as to the total effect of Christianity on the
moral nature of man, hatred of the tyranny of the majority;
insistence on the supreme value to the community and to the
universe of freely developing individuals, almost mystical faith in
the ideal of liberty, liberty of thought, liberty of discussion, liberty
of action, liberty for every one, always every where :

For where Freedom lives not.

There live no good things'’

There was once again a turn in the tide and in the conclud-
ing part of his life Swinburne produced a collection of poems
steeped in medieval atmosphere in 'Tristram and Other Poems
(1882). The poems of this volume are forceful and vigorous in
passion and arc presented mostly in the heroic couplet. Swinburne
returned to Love, his favourite theme, in two later series of
Poe ms and Ballad s, those of 1878 and 1889. In the lyrics and
ballads of these volumes the early promise is not fulfilled.
“Swinburne does not renew himself as Hugo does; he is singing
the old themes with an accent which has less intensity, with a
rhythm which has less sweetness, less of the dizzy speed of hit early
days. Old age is no boon to a lyrical poet.”*

E. K B'own : Swinburne— A Centenary Estimate.

( 121 )

The study of these poetical works brings out the prominent
qualities of Swinburne’s poetry. He was primarily a melodist and
for him music of poetry was above all things a consummation
devoutly to be wished. "If the function of poetry is to suggest
rather than to explore, and to suggest by cadence and image»
then Swinburne was truly a poet. He developed to an
extreme a tendency that was implicit in the whole romantic
tridition. But the poetry of exploration and discovery which
is the greatest kind of poetry, was not for him/'^

Q«^^27. Wfa. t are the main characteristics of A. C.
Swinburne’s poetry ?

OR

^Youthful as Swinburne’s poetry essentially is, I believe that
a little of the best of it, generations hence, will remain, still, full
ofjyouth” (F. L. Lucas) Discuss.

/ f \ Ans. Swinburne was one of the great poets of the Victorian
age. For the last ten years of his life he was currently accepted
as the greatest living English poet, though a reaction has set
against the poet in our times. T. S. Eliot is in the front rank of
those critics who have found Swinburne’s and Shelley’s . lyricism
"feeble” ‘‘shabby” "repellent.” Swinburne has been defended
by a number of critics, and his youthful enthusiasm, his lyricism
and melody have . won the admiration of many* readers
in our times.

A Critic of Yictorlan Society.

Swinburne was a critic of Victorian society, and the
Victorian ideals met. sledge hammer blows at his hand. "Of all
the great Victorian poets it was he who made the most direct
attack upon the idols of his time, upon the sentimental conception
of love, upon bourgeois democracy, upon the institutional
expressions of the Christian religion. For his daring he has paid .
heavily : a sulphurous cloud still hangs over his name, his
work has always had about it the aroma of heresy, revolt
and evil.”^»

* David Daiches : A Critical Hirtory df Eogllsh Litmture, Volume II.

B. K. Brown : Swinburne : A.Ceiiteoary Bstimate.

( 122 )

'^As a Poet of Semaousness and I<OTe

In the eatly years of his poetic career Swinbaroe vas
essentiaUy the twet of passion, and sensnottSD^ The publication
of the Poems and Ballads in (1866) established the claim of
Swinburne as a poet of sensuousness, and physical passion.
“Neves since Verna and Adonis, Hero and Leander and the Songs
and Sonnets'ol Donne had the passion of the senses been presen-
ted with such dating frankness; and little dramatic disguise as
in the Hymn of Proserpine and other pieces. The following
lines from The Hymn of Poserpine are frankly sensuous :

Her languid lips are sweeter
Than love's who fears io greet her
To men that mix and meet her
From many times and lands.

The sensualism of the first volume of Po»ms and Ballads
established the cult of Venus worship, and w'ts a step onwards in
the creed of naturalism.

Swinburne composed a number of poems dealing with the
subject of love. He is the poet of passion and love, tho^h many
modern critics have not considered him a great poet of love. It
is pointed out that Swinburae’s love poems are extremely sadistic
,in tone; and of love he Imows *only one mood' — the mood of
despair and rejection. He associates the emotion of love with the
inStciion~6rpaIn in such poems as Anactoria, Felise, Faustine and
the famous Dolores. But this criticism of Swinburne’s love poetry
is not very correct, for there ate many love poems in which the
mood is not one of despair and saddism but 'triumph. The
Triumph of Time inspire of the note of sadness for the cruel
attitude of Jane Faulker, is “a supremely effective expression
of a mood of love which is utterly remote from the ecstasies over
Dolores and her strange sisterhood : the mood is one that Yeats
and Housman have both expressed.** The Year of the Rose is ajgain
written in a differen t ke y t^j^ ~ the

truth' “inHat S^nburne was the first poet to sing one perver-
ted form of love, but was not by his peculiarity incapacitated

* Oiierson and Smith : A Critieal History of English foetiy.

( 123 )

from singing other forms with a power not inferior to that of the
great love-poets of the age/**

Aa n Po^t of Liberty

A change came in Swinb u rnc*s iife .^after-^±hf> .P4}£ms . and
Ballads of 1866» a nd the transformation was brought about by the
cold rcicction Jane Faulkner and the turning of

the tide by his friend and philosopher Jowett in favour of Italy
and Maaaine, the great Italian patriot. Swinburne’s next venture
in poetry was in quite a different direction. His Songs before
Stj^rise are not songs of passio^ and^love» but songs of liberty ,
freedom, and patriotism. Swinburne is the poet of liberty par
excellence^ and his political poems are a poetic translation of the
creed of liberty advocated by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty,
Swinburne defended the Italian fighters of freedon against
Austfain tyranny and roused their enthusiasm by such
lines as —

For where Freedom lives naf, there live no good things*

He rebelled like Shelley against tyranny and oppression,
and became a poet of revolt. He bitterly attacked Austria and
Russia for their attempt to trample Hungarian struggle for freedom.
In the sonnet To Louis Kossuth (1877)» the Hungarian patriot is
Swinburne’s meed of praise. His ode On Russia, and his sonnets
on the Launch of the Livadia are extremely effective in tone, and
condemn tyrants and oppressors in a fierce language.

As a Poet of Patriotism and Jingoism

To the spirit of the Songs the later political poetry of
Swinburne appears to be in irreconcilable contrast. From a
revolutionary idealist he turned into a narrow nationalist, almost
a jingo. Some of the poems of Swinburne are ^^tremely
patriotic and jingoistic intone, jii^ 2Vie IF/i/re C^r, he attacks
Russian imperialism and de nounces j^e^C^r in a scornful
manner!

Thou set thy foot where England used to stand
Thou'^reach thy rod forth over Indian land.

]^ny poems of Swinburne i^e highly patr iotic in to ne,
»nd exhibit love for his couni ^. He celebrated the^rst

E. K. Blown : Swinburne :| A Centenary Estimate from University of
Toronto Quarterly, VI fl937).

( 124 )

Jubilee of Queen Victoria in Th e Commo nweciti The Armada which
follows The Commonweal in the third series of Poems and Ballads
recounts the heroism and bravery of British soldiers and sailors
during the feign of Queen Blizabeth. He speaks proudly of th(
days when England held supreme sway over the wa,tety sea
and the sek of song which had been extended by the poetic output
of the Elizabethan singers :

More than that sovereign lordship oj the sea

Bequeathed to Cromwell from Elizabeth

More than all {deeds wrought of thy strong right hand.

This praise keeps most thy fame* s memorial strong.

That thou wast head of all these streams of song,

* And time bows down to thee asiShakespeare^s land.

As m poet of the Middle Ages.

The note of medievalism sounded by the Pre JRLaphaelite
poets is also heard in the poetry of Swinburne particularly in
Tristram of Lyonesse* His medievalism is very much different
from that of Morris and Rossetti. He had no love for the cathO'
licism and mysticism of the Middle Ages, and he did not seek
to catch the spirit^ of religious piety prevalent in those days.
*‘He was in sympathy with the mediaevalism of the sinner Villon,
rather than with that which celSshrates saints and martyrs and
Madonnas. He could admire but it would never have been his
impulse to write The Blessed DomozeV^^ His poems leave the
impression of remoteness of actuality. W. R. Rutland suggests
<*that Swinburne is as remote as the Elizabethans; he belongs
to jhe past, as unquestionably as Hardy belongs to the present/*
As a Poet of Childhood

Swinburne had a great love for children and many of hi$
poems deal with child life, with a note of Sympathy
genuine uhd^stahdfihg'. His well known poems of child life are
ChiidfehV A^Child*s^ A Child*s Steep, Cradle Songs. He

takes his place among the child poets of England; though he
failed to catch the mystical glimpses' of child life /which ' Blak<:
and Wordsworth had caught in their poems. ^Switiburne iould
write of the simple joys and innocence of aav

mystification : ^

' Hugh Walker : 1 he Ltierhtuie ot the Victorian Era.

< 125 )

Baby^ baby dear
Earth and heaven are near
Now, for heaven is here*
a Port of Natj^^ao^the

Swinburne lovccl nature and particularly the sea. He had
an unerring eye for the beauties of "Hature, though he could not
be a great pictorial artist in the presentation of the landscapes
like Tennyson. The Four Songs of Four Seasons bear witness
to his love for Nature. The Hounds of Spring represents his
love for the sights and scenes of the spring season. The follow-
ing lines from this ode to the loveliness of spring represent
Swinburne’s love for nature in its vernal beauty :

The full streams feed on flower of rushes
Ripe grass trammel a travelling footy
The faint fresh flame of the young year flushes
From leaf to flower and flower to fruit
And fruit and leaf are as gold and fir
And the oat is heard above the lyre^

And the hoofed heel of a satyr crushes
The chestnut husk at the chestnut root.

‘ Swinbume!s. 1 q.vc for the sea is very much alike that of
Kipling and Masefield in our times. His love of the sea is
reflected in ./rj . fAc. Watery On the VergCy In the Salt
Marshes and The Triumph of Time* The sea could move him to
strange transports of joy. Here are a few lines which represent
his love for the sea and the storm :

The sea is awake, and the sound of the
Song of the joy of her waking is rolled.

From afar to the star that recedes, from anear
- To the wastes of the wide wide shore.

d

I shall sleep and move with the moving ships
Change as the winds change^ veer in the tide
My lips will feast on the foam of thy Ups
' Ishali rise with thy rising, with thee subside.

Swiabu^ne^s Melody and Lyricism

If there is anything in Swinburne's poetry it is melody a nd
lyricism. JJc carried the prosody of the Romantic age to its"

( 126 )

exttexne point of mcllifluousness fobbing the HybU Bees ol
their sweetness. *‘Just as Rossetti made thought pictorially
sensuous, Swinburne has made thought musically sensuous. He
is not merely melodic — Shelley wis gloriously melodic — he is har>
monk. Shelley’s music is the music of the lute; Swinburne’s the
music of a full orchestra. His melod jcs ar e rich and complex,
with a sweeping grandeur that no other poet has equalled, much
less excelled. Swinburne’s verse may be likened to an orchestral
concert with solos : we recognise both the melodious sweetness
and quality of differing instruments; and the concerted harmonies
of all playing together.”*

Swinburne set great store by music and .emphasised the
necessity of the singing element in poetry. In his opinion a poet
who lacked the power of singing was not worthy to be recognised
a great poet. Thought is certainly necessary for poetry, but greater
than thought, Swinburne paid attention to the power to sing.
In a letter to E. C. Stedman in 1875 he expressed his con-
ception of a great poet. He wrote: ^*The thing more necessary
than august meditation and patriotic feeling is the pulse^ the
fire, the passion of music— the quality of a singer, not of a solitary
philosopher, or a patriotic orator.” However, Swinburne did not
believe that the power to sing is the whole of poetry. He laid
emphasis on nobility of substance and intensity of emotion, but
mofc than these he emphasised the power to sing.

He had a‘ 'great admiration for those who were great
singers and a Iso^ p rophe ts. He admired Marlowe, Shelley,
Hugo, and Shakespeare because in them, thought and music
were harmoniously combined. The prophets whose song was
wheeay and harsh could me kc no appeal to him. He valued highly
his own power of song. At a conversation at jowett’s tea-table
he made the remark when he was asked who among the Bnglish
poets had the best ear. ‘^Shakespeare, without doubt; then Milton;
then Shelley; then I do not know what other people would do,
but 1 should put myself.” Indeed, unless one will give to Spenser
the fourth place, the choice of Swinburne being the forth singer
in verse is beyond dispute. From the lines of the first Chorus
in bis first great poem, Atlanta in Ca^yian^ to bis Enghnd : An Ode,

" ckett : A History of English Uiemiure.

( 127 )

he remained a musician in verse, and a lyrist of a high order.
The sonority of the rhymes or of the modulations is that which
links his verses together. Vowels call^to vowels and consonants,
to consonants and these links often seem stronger than the links
of thought and imagery. He had a full command of rhythm and
versification^ and employed the English metre in his own way,
and in his own style. To many his rhythm and song seemed
monotonous, and to others diffuse. They brought the charge of
diffuseness against the poet in his very face but he never bothered
about it. Relying on sound rather than on concrete imagery,
he protracted his poems till they became irresistible incantations
and finally lulled the reader into a condition in which he received
the emotional effect according to the poet’s desire.

The lyrics of Swinburne h ave little structu ral design. We
can take out verses from his poems without affecting their general
impression. A single stanaa could be abstracted at almost any
point from Hertha, Fau<tine, or Dolores, and the poems would
suffer very little damage. There is a general diffuseness in his
lyrics. They lure us by their sound and fail to create a concrete
picture. The imagery is clouded by the fuzz of words. But
the lyrical charm of the poems is not lost.

**Swinburne*s claims to greatness rest upon his lyrics and
lyrical passages in his narratives and tragedies. His lyricism
expresses itself without much assistance from two qualities which,
in English poetry at least, usually characterize the masters of the
lyric — firm composition, and distinct, vivid imagery. Shelley,
too, lacks these qualities, if not altogether, certainly in very large
part. In compensation Swinburne and Shelley offer luxuriant
song and vehement thought. Swinburne’s thought, like Shelley’s
is that of a revolutionary idealist; it is without hesitations or
nuances; it is simple, bold, and passionate, and to those who ate
out of tune with revolutionary idealism it seems superficial,
ignorant, and appropriate to lands beyond the moon. Swinburne’s
ideas are intellectually respectable : such d^trines as the unity
of man with nature, the dignity of humanity, the supreme value
ef liberty, are not easily dismissed as feeble or shabby. They are
topical doctrines of John Stuart Mill; and if some one chooses to
say that Mill is no longer intellectually respectable, I throw up

( 128 )

my hands, and am content to leave Swinburne, as thinker in his
company. Appropriately, Swinburne’s revolutionary . idealism
is clothed in verse which moves as swiftly as the wings of thought,
which stirs a tumult of feelings so great that the reader is eager
to relieve an over burdenccd spirit by violent action. At bis best,
between Swinburne’s thought and his art there is perfect harmony:
a multiplicity of straining, intense particles are caught and
held in a strange unity. The effect produced is not complex
or fine but it is strong; and even those who resent its
furious strength Cannot, if they expose themselves to it, resist
its impact.”f ^

•1^'" ■

Q. 28. Wbat contribution was made to Victorian poetry
by Coventry Patmore (1823-1896), Francis Thompson (1859-1907),
George Meredith (1828-1909) and Thomas Hardy (1840-1928;.

Convcntry Patmore (1823-1896).

Coventry Patmore was among the minor poeta of the
Victorian Age. ^Despite his many rhythmic felicities, and his
undoubted technical skill, his excessive fluency, and. frequent
banalities, seem to the present writers to exclude Patmore from
the front rank.”**

It was one of the characteristic features of Patmore that he
combined spiritual love with physical love. He considered the
physical as the manifestation of the spiritual love. Housman was
not satisfied with this mixture and made the remark, "I should say
as little as possible about this nasty mixture of piety and
concupiscence.”

The earliest work of Coventry Patmore was Afigel In, the
House. Here he presents the story of a true love ending in marriage.
Felix, the lover earns F 600 a year, while Honoria, the Dean’s
daughter, whom he marries has F 300 and more in prospect.
They were true lovers, and were happily married at the end.
Patmore glorifies married love. The value of this work does
not lie so much in the story, but in its sprightliness. ^^he Angel
in the House lives by its Preludes, with their intimate analysis

* E. K. Brown : Swinburne : A C^enteaary Ettimaie.

** Compton-Rickett : A Histor^ of Eogtlsb Uteraiufe.

( 129 )

of a lover’s moods, their epigrams someti nes trite, but always
polished, and their occasional felicities of phrase and profound-
ities of feeling. In this work we have fine lyrics like Greek
choruses interspersed between the Cantos, and they add to the
real charm of the long poem by which Patmore sought to eclipse
Dante’s Divine Comedy^,

*‘The quiet confidence with which Patmore marshals his
quatrains, the steady — one might almost say obstinate — charting
of the course of upper-middle-class love running smoothly
to happy marriage, produce a poem sequence of intermittent
charm, there are longuors and fatuities, but there is also a
restrained and precise recording of moods, scenes, and situations
that shows a new and successful kind of domestic poetry. To
be fresh and natural was a Pre-Raphaelite idea, and The An^el
in the Mousey for all its total lack of the medieval properties and
of the symbolic objects which we associate with Pce-Raphaeliticis n
is Pre-Raphaelite in this sense.”

The Victories of Love is a sequel to The An^eL Patmore
takes the fate of Honoria’s rejected lover and his subsequent
marriage with another woman as the theme of this poem. The
pathos of this poem is touching particularly when the death of
the lady who married the rejected lover of Honoria of the An^el
is presented by the poet, Amelia is the third love poem ot
Patmore. It tells us ‘how an elderly lover took his young betrothed
to see her dead rival’s grave — a situation inviting mockery, but
treated by Patmore with disarming innocence.”

In 1877 was published The Unknown EroSy a collection of
Nature poems and satirical odes. He might have done better as
a writer of satirical verse, if he had devoted his energy to this
side rather than to the treatment of his “angelic” themes. But
Patmore’s preoccupation was with love, and he set out to present
the glorification of sex believing — “So God created man in his
own image, in the image of God created. He him ; male and
female created. He them.” His key to life whether on earth cr
in Heaven is sex :

In the arithmetic of life

The smallest unit is a pair,

• (»n>rsoo and Smith : A Critical History of English Poetry.

( 130 )

“In his later work he attempts sometimes the ecstasies of
C-rashaw, but his ardours are not poetically realised in spite of
metrical ingenuities and Pindaric stuctures; the best of his later
poems are descriptive of natural scenery or short projections ot
a single emotional situation in a domestic context, as in the well
known little lyric The Toys. Essentially Patmore is not a poet
of ecstatic feeling or introspective subtlety; he is the poet ot
genteel sensibility, which at his best he renders with moving
conviction.’'* “Patmore remains a classic, if a minor classic, of
the Mid-Victorian Age”.

Francis Ihompson (1859-1907)

Like Coleridge, Thompson was addicted to opium. His first
volume of Poems was published in 1893. It was followed by
Sister Songs in 1895. Thompson was essentially a religious poet
and he will be remembered by his Hound of Heaveity where in a
flamboyant style, he narrates how man seeks to elude God though
the Almighty is after his well being. The imaginative daring and
sonorous beauty of thjs magnificent poem dazzles us. He is one
with Christina Rossetti in the sphere of devotional poetry. No
writer has excelled him in the presentation of Catholic philoso-
phy and pietism. His In No Strange Land is a typical catholic
poem representing his faith that Christ can be seen walking on
the waters ol Thames, it we have faith as the ruling passion of
our life.

“Francis Thompson may be called a child of the early
j?evcntecnth century. Like the group of poets which included
Vaughan, and Crashaw he made religion the major subject of his
verse, and like them he wrote of the themes of divine and human
love, of birth and death sometimes with the intimate simplicity
of a child, and again with the strange and ardent subtlety of the
philosopher. And like them he brought to the expression of
these mysteries profound intellectual concepts and a language new
to the uses of poetry.”

George Meredith (1828-1909).

Meredith, the novelist, was equally a poet of great calibre.
All Meredith’s poems can be designated with one^ ^gnificant
title A Reading of Earth. He was an intellectual who accepted

• David Daiches : A Cnucal History of English LUefature.

( 131 j

Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection and applied it to his noveh
and poems. He interpreted modern life and modern love in thi
light of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution.

Meredith believed in struggle and lived according tc
Nature’s dictates. Nature’s purpose was the betterment of th(
race, and her work of rejuvenation could be possible only whei
man tried to rise above the merely physical passion. Mereditl
was of the view that "‘true marriage, marriage that promises fai
offspring, is the marriage of minds, not a union brought abou
by mere passion crying

As the birds do, so do nr,

BUI our mate and choose our tree.

Meredith presented tragedy of love brought about b
passion in several of his poems. In his famous poem Moder,
Love "he shadows forth the inner tragedy of his own first marriage
the union of two high-spirited, highly civilized beings, who dr
not grow together in love and understanding, but drift apart, ye
hanker still for the dead days of youthful passion.” It is th
exaltation of mere physical passion in love that brings tragedy
in life. Frustrated passion is the theme of most of the Ballads
and Poems of Tragic Lift'. In Meredith ‘the head outgrew the
heart’ and tragedy sprang from the heart.

In Anew'inis Harp and Odes in Contribution to the Song of
French History Meredith presented the struggle for life between
Nations.

“Meredith was a master of metre and rhythm. Phaethon is
a daring experiment in the rarest of classical metres, the Gallambie,
aiming, not without success, at an effect of precipitate speed.”

(Grierson & Smith),

I homas Hardy (1840 1928)

“Hardy did not simply make poetry out of life ; he made
life into poetry” observes F. L. Lucas in Ten Victorian Poets,
and there is much truth in the statement. The poetry of Hardy
is intimately related to the realities of life and is a truthful and
sincere expression of what he had . actually felt, seen, and experi-
enced in his life. “Much poetry is merely daydreaming made
immortal by the magic power of words. But with Hardy it is
different. It is not a dream that he seems to bring before us ;

( 132 )

but a vision not some vista remote from the reality we live in, but
a vision of that reality more vivid than our own.’’* Hardy
circd more for truth than beauty, and to him creation of mere
beauty did not appear to be a poet’s job. ‘‘There are poets like
Tennyson who think of Beauty before Truth ; they tend to produce
poetry that is perfect rather than great” says F. L. Lucas, “and
there are poets like Hardy who have a feeling for Truth even
before Beauty ; these tend to produce poetry that is great rather
than perfect.” Hardy emphasised Truth and the motto ot his
entire work can be gathered from the last two lines of the
following stan7.a :

Between us now and here

Two thrown together

Let there he truth at last

Even if despair-

Hardy’s poetry is sad in its truthful represent ition of life.
The poet saw misery and grief writ large on the screen of social
life, and he presented the picture of human life with as great a
fidelity as he had perceived it. He could not believe in Brovrning’s
complacent optimism. “Funny man. Browning” said Hardy, “all
that optimism ! He must have put it in to please the public.
He could not have believed it.” Hardy was temperamentally
incapable of seeing any justification for life’s optimism. He was
haunted by a sense of the transience of life and presented gloomy
pictures of human destiny under the iron heel of fleeting time.

He could not hold out any hope in a world where God was
notin his heaven and everything depended on the freak of a
chance spoiling human life.

If Truthfulness is one feature of Hardy’s poetry, compassion
is another. “Without that, the bitter truth in his pages might seem
too bitter, the irony too sardonic ; but that pity which he found so
wanting in the universe crowns his own work with oerfect things
like Jess\s Lament** His poems ring with genuine sympathy for his
men and women.

Hardy wrote a number of love-poems. They ate the most
intense and impassioned part of his work. Their range is wide
and they deal with a variety of aspects. Problems arising ant of

F L. Lucas : Ten Victonan Poets.

( 133 )

unhappy marriages, children born out ot wedlock, the woman with
‘a past\ and her relations with her husband, modern problems of
love have been presented in his poems. The Flirt's Tragedy^
A Sunday Morning Tragedy^ The Mock Wife^ The AVw
Cameras Wife are some of his love poems ending on a note of
tragedy.

Hardy’s poems on Nature are a significant part of his
poetry. He failed to see everything good or wise in Nature. To
a realist like Hardy the crass cruelty of Nature was not something
to be easily passed over in a poetic way. “For Wordsworth Nature
could do no wrong” says F. L. Lucas; “for Hardy all her beauty
could not hide her witless cruelty.” Hardy said, “Nature is radi-
antly beautiful— let us feast our eyes; but she is also a blind
iiend — let us face that too.”

Hardy’s lyrics are without that rapture and abandon which
we expect to find in good lyrics. At best his lyrics have the cold-
ness of Arnold’s lyrics. His lyrics lack flexibility and spontaneity.
In fact, he is even less of a singer than Meredith. “Line is
added to line in a determined pattern, but the lines only on rare
occasions generate a circuit of pure song.”

Hardy’s style is a little rugged. There is a certain gnarled
grandeur like that of an oak. Mostly his diction is prosaic.

Hardy’s metrical skill was much better than many of the
contemporary poets. “1 doubt if any English poet has more studied
the craft of verse, or invented more new metrical forms and vari-
ations than Hardy” (F. L. Lucas).

Hardy’s greatest work is Dynast'i. His Wessex Poems and
Other Verses (1898), Poems of the Past and the Present (1902)
pale into insignificance before the majesty of Dynasts. This
monumental epic-drama was issued from 1904 to 1908. It deals
with the war with Napoleon front 1805 to 1815 and consists of
nineteen acts and one hundred and thirty scenes. It is in the words
of Lascelles Abercrombie, “the biggest, the most consistent and
deliberate exhibition of fatalism in Literature.”

( 134 )

Q. 29. Write a note on the writrrs of Light Verse and
Parody during the Victorian Age.

Ans. Lucilius was the first great poet who cultivated the
art of writing satirical and 4 umorous poetry in a mocking style.
Eutler, the author of Hudibras and Matthew Prior, the witty
composer of The Town Mouse and the Country Mousey a burlesque
on the Hind and the Panther of Oryden, got their inspiration from
l.ucilius, and passed on the buck to Victorian parodists and
writers of light verse.

Among the Victorians tf ere were a number of parodists and
w^riters of humorous work. Thia ‘light brigade’ includes many
familiar names. John Hookham Frere (1769-1846) was a master in
the art of composing witty verses and wrote fine lines like —

Dinner and supper kept their usual hours
Breakfast and luncheon tiever were delayed.

Be outshone Gay in witticism and influenced parodists like
James and Horace Smith. Later on Richard Barham (1788-1845)
shot into fame by his In^tdds hy Legends which proved “a little
godsend to Victorian reciters though their popularity, once so
great, has declined almost to zero of late year.” Theodore Hook
(1788-1841) was the master of ‘audacious sallies of wit’, and the
following lines which he wrote on Mr. Winter, a tax collector-
exhibit his wit :

Here conies Hr. Winter collector of taxes

Vd advise you to pay him whatever he axesy

Excuse won't do ; he stands no sort of flummery '

Though Winter his name his process is Summary,

James Robinson Blanche (1796-1880) had a knack of pre-
senting extravagant things in a humorous manner. His verses are
marked with “a play of fancy and a lighter touch, and his’humour
wears better than that of Hook.” Samuel Lover (1797-1868) ’ the
Irish man, won his laurels by his whimsical and Celtic humour :

In youth — we've our troubles before us.

In age — we leave pleasure behind. - i

Butterfly Baly (1797-1839) wrote light humorous verse, and
though the Butterfly is lower than the Lover, yet he is unforgett
able and has hi$ place among the group of the light brigade by
his Why don*t the Men Propose ? In Winthrop Mackworth Pracd

( 135 )

; 1802-1839), we have a writ:c ot .the genius of Matthew Prior. In
his lighter verse, there is “some affinity with Hood, but he relies
tat less on mere verbal humours, and his wit has a finer boquet/'
Richard Monckton Milnes (1809-1885) was happiest when he wrote
in “light and irresponsible mood.” Edward Lear (1812-1888)
was more than a mere writer of light verse. “He is one of the
.*;reat original comic forces ot the century, and his incomparable
Nonsense Verses constitute a land mark in the development of
humorous literature.’* Fredrick Locker-La mpson (1821-1895)
excelled Praed in poetic fire though he was less ‘dexterous and
}:>olished in his triflings.” Charles Stuart Calverley (1831-1884) was
a famous parodist of Browning and his The ("ork and the Bull is
well known for its imitation of Browning. His mantle fell on
(. K. Stephen and not less brilliant R. F. Murray. William S.
Cjiibert (1836-191L won fame by his B th B iHads. Here we have
humorous thumb nail sketches. The gaiety of his verse is pleasing.
Henry S. Leigh (1837- 1889) wrote Carols of Cockayne^ ‘facile,
nimble, pleasantries in verse.’ Lewis Carrol was another great
writer of witty and humorous verse. The example of these light
verse writers has been followed by a host of 20th century writers ot
verse and parodies. In modern times Sir Owen Seaman, R. C.
Lehmann, C. L. Graves, E. V. Lucis, Barry Pain, Dum-Dum,
Adrian Ross and Harry Graham have won laurels in the field of
light verse. Punch givcsS the fullest scope for all those who arc
gifted with a light vein, and can compose pleasing parodies and
write witty and extravagant verse.

Q. 30. What are the main trends and features of Victorian
Poetry?

Ans. The poetry o| the Victorian age presents a wide
Variety. While some of the Victorian poets were interested in
the presentation of Victorian life in their poetry, others kept
Uierriselves away from the cross currents of the social, political,
itiid economic life of the age. In the poetry of Tennyson, we hear
vv hp^s of Victorian life, and he is the poet of the age expressing
not so much a personal as a national spirit. “For nearly half
century” says W. J. Long, “Tennyson -was not only a man and
^ poet, he was a voice, the voice of a. whole people expressing

( 136 )

in exquisite melody their doubts and their faith, griefs and thei
triumphs. As a poet who expresses not so much a personal a
a national spirit, he is probably the most representative literar
man of the Victorian era.” Tennyson’s poetry stands as
representative of the age and is an epitome of his times. It i
one of the marked features of Victorian poetry to represent th
social, political, economic conditions of the age. Mr. Browniiii
draws our attention to the deplorable state of industrial affair
of the age in Cry of Children and Tennyson refers to the progres
achieved on the material plane in Locksley tfall.

In contrast to Tennyson, there stands the unique figure
of Browning expressing another trend of Victorian poetry, nameh
its preoccupation with spiritual, philosophical and moral problems
The Pre-Raphaelite poets strike another note in Victoria i
poetry. The poetry of Rossetti, Morris, and Swinburne is fai
away from the materialistic problems of the age, and is a reviva
of the romantic spirit which had been sounded with great succesj
by Coleridge, Keats and Shelley. In a way Victorian poetry is an
extension of romantic poetry, particularly in its preoccupatior
with the middle ages, mysticism, supernaturalism. The spirit oJ
Romanticism continued to influence the innermost consciousnes*
of the age which gave a Tennyson, a Thackeray, a Browning
and an Arnold. To quote A. J. Wyatt, “The poetry of the age
of Tennyson docs not differ from that of Wordsworth’s contem-
poraries as a result of any change of theory. There is a difference,
but the difference is not fundamental as is that between Pope’h
poetry and Wordsworth’s. Tennyson and bis contemporaries reco-
gnised the authenticity of their iuiuicJiate predecessors and were
influenced by them. Especially is this influence noticeable
in the debt of Tennyson to Keats and (Ai^nold to Wordsworth ”

The romantic spirit of the age of Wordsworth, Keats aiiJ
Shelley is reflected in the pessimistic strain in Victorian poetry
The poetry of Matthew Arnold, Arthur Hugh Clough, Janies
Thomson ani Fitzgerald is marked with pessimism and despair.
The elegiac note in Arnold’s poetry is as conspicuous as the optim-
istic note in Browning’s poetry. In Victorian poetry we bear notes
of pessimism as well as inspiring words of optimism spoken by
Browning “Tennyson’s immature work, like that of the minor

( 137 )

poets, is sometimes in a doubting or desparing strain; but his
In Memoriam is like the rainbow after storm; and Browning
seems better to express the ’spirit of his age in the strong, manly
faith of Rabbi Ben Ezra and in the courageous optimism of all
his poetry.”*

The moral note is sounded by Victorian poets, and almost
ill of them have a message to impart through their poetry. The
>oetry of Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold, Edward
Fitzgerald, Christina Rossetti is ridden by a message. All these
poems have superb faith in their message. Browning gives the
message of struggle against heavy odds in human life; Matthew
Arnold has the message of stoicism and endurance of all pains and
inflictions; Tennyson gives the message of lawful living; Christina
Rossetti of renunciation and resignation. Art for Ait’s sake
without any moral message is no doubt pursued by the Pre-
Raphaelites, but their adoration of art, love, and painting is not
so impressive as the message of Victorian poetry.

We find several poetic forms cultivated by the Victorian
poets. The lyric output was very large and varied. In descriptive
and narrative poetry there was a great advance particularly
noticeable in Tennyson and Morris. Tennyson thought of revi-
ving the epic, but in him epical impulse was not sufficiently
strong and his great narrative poems were produced as smaller
fragments which he called Idylis. Browning perfected the
dramatic monologue, and made it a patent instrument of self-
expression.

Different kinds of poetic styles were cultivated by the
Victorian poets. '‘In the case of poetry the more ornate
btyle was represented in Tennyson who developed artistic schemes
of vowel music, alliteration, and other devices in a manner
quite unprecedented. The Pre-Raphaelites carried the method
‘itill further. In diction they were simpler than Tennyson, but
their vocabulary was more archaic and their mass of detail more
highly coloured. The style of Browning was to a certain extent
a protest against the aureate diction. He substituted for it
simplicity and a heady speed, especially in his earlier lyrics,
his more mature obscurity was merely an effect of his eager

W S Long: fingHsh Literature.

( 138 )

imagination and reckless impetuosity. Matthew Arnold, in
addition, was too classical in style to care for over-developed
picturesqueness, and wrote with a studied simplicity. On the
whole, however, we can say that the average poetical style of this
period, as a natural reaction against the simpler methods of the
period immediately preceding, was ornate rather than simple.’'*

With its superb production, the Victorian Age produced
no supreme poet. It revealed no Shakespeare, no Shelley, nor
a Byron, or a Scott. “The age produced no questionably major
poet, but only a number of technically accomplished poets who
look major but remain essentially minor. There is perhaps the
clearest indication of some deficiency in the creative work of the
period. Where so much poetry was written and read, it is
pu^.zling that there should be so little that is comparable with
Blake’s Songs of Experience^ Wordsworth’s The Prelude^ Crabb’^
Tales in Verse, or 'by totCs Vision of Judgement. It is, as if, the
act of composition in Victorian poetry did not take place as
a result of pressures within the minds of individual poet’s but
had its origin in more general impression and aims.”**

E. Albert : A Hisidiy'of English Liteiature.
G. D. Klingopulos : The Victorjen Scene,

PROSE OF

THE VIC I ORIAN AGE

MISCELLANEOUS PROSE WRITERS

Q. 31. Give an account of the main works of Thomas Carlyle
(1795-1881).

Ans. Thomas Carlyle was the dominant figure of the
Victorian period. He was one of the most leading personalities
of the age. He started his literary career by writing a few pamph-
lets and later on harnessed his pen to the production of many
monumental works which made him immortal in the
history of English Literature. The main works Carlyle
are : Sartor Resartus, French Revolution^ Heroes and Hero-
worship^ Past end Present^ Letters and Speeches of Oliver
Cromwell, Life of John^ Sterling, The History of Fredrick the
Great and Letters and Reminiscences. We will briefly deal with
each of his works. .

(1) Sartor Resartus (1833-34).

Sartor Resartus is Carlye’s first creative work and is rightly
regarded as the quintessence of his philosophical thoughts. In
this book Carlyle seeks to present the views and opinions of a
German philosopher at the university of Weissnichtwo. The name
of the professor is Her Diogenes Teufelsdrockh. Carlyle only
works as an editor, editting the old Professor’s manuscripts which
are supposed to consist of numerous sheets {'packed into twelve
paper bags, each labeled with the sign of zodiac. Carlyle seeks
to be ^*an expositor of this weltering mass of words, endeavouring
desperately to extract order out of chaos, and to lighten the dark
and mystic abysses of the German professor’s thoughts.” Though
the aims and opinions set forth in these volumes are those of the
old German professor yet they are really •speaking the views of
the author himself. In fact, Carlyle sets forth his own dreams and
ideals under the guise of the German professor. Albert righly

( 140 )

says, ‘*It is an extraordinary book, pretending to contain the
opinions of a German professor; but under a thin veil of fiction
Carlyle discloses his own spiritual struggles during his early trou-
bled years. The style is violent and exclamatory, and the meaning
is frequently obscured in a torrent of words, but it has an energy
and a rapturous ecstasy of revolt that quite take the breath
away.”*

In this monumental work Carlyle expounds '‘clothes-philo-
sophy.” In the first place clothes stand for shams and pretences,
hollow rank, hollow officialism and hollow customs. All these
are designated as clothes because they hide the real form of society.
These clothes' must be burnt for they have outlived their utility.
These clothes are mechanical in character and cannot have
any place in a society set upon spiritual progress. Later on the
‘clothes-philosophy’ is applied to the universe at large. Just as
clothes hide the real society, similarly time and space, which
arc no better than clothes, hide the spiritul essence of the
universe. This spiritual philosophy of the universe is developed
with great force and is couched in a style which is picturesque
though at places incoherent and confused. Many of the passages
in this book read like poetry and the reader’s attention is parti-
cularly directed to such chapters as the ‘Everlasting No/ ‘The
Everlasting Yes* ‘Reminiscences' and ‘Natural Supernaturalism.'

(2) The French Revolution (1837)

Carlyle’s French Revolution is a prose epic of the great
cataclysm that shook Europe and ushered in a new way of life.
Carlyle’s aim in writing the history of the French Revolution is
not to be a record of the dry-as-dust events that are generally
presented by a historian. Instead of being the historian of the
French Revolution, (Carlyle chooses to be its poet and in a fascinat-
ing and picturesque style he presents the events and the great per-
sonages of the French Revolution. “The French Revolution is not a
history; indeed Carlyle had not the makings, for his vision is not
panoramic* He never seeks to retell the story of the past, but to
explain the significance of the past, and this he does in a series of
pictures, rather than the physical appearances,”**

* E. Albert ; A History of English Literature.

Compton RickeU: A Histoiy of English Literature.

( HI )

Carlyle’s response to the experience of history of the French
Revolution is more akin - to that of a painter rather than to a
thinker. He portrays the events and hgures of the French
Revolution in the language of visual or audihle sensation than
in the logical speech of scientific thought or reason. CJarlylc
throws flash lights upon men in dramatic situations, and brings f)ut
the striking scenes of French history and French heroes in a
picturesque and colourful style, aglow with zest and enthusiasm.
\s wc go through the pages of this prose poem or dramatic poem,
we fee, I that wc are reading a great piece of literature rather than
a dry record of history. The book appears to us a series of word
pictures rather than sober history and wc feel hypnotised with the
wealth of the colour and the richness of imagery, with which the
events arc unfolded by the great author. There is no exaggeration
in L. P. Smith’s observation that Carlyle’s “-great prose-poem on
the French Revolution is not only a great gallery of scenes and
portraits depicted in the smoke and glare of that volcanic out
burst, but it is a great tone-poem as well, a rushing vociferous
piece of orchestral music, resonant with trumpets and battle-cries,
with salvoes of artillery and wild peals of tocsin-bells ringing
from all steeples.”

Carlyle’s moral vigour comes out in this stirring narrative of
stormy events and personages. He emphasises the working of
moral justice in human affairs and draws our attention to the
nemises that must over-take the wrong-doers. “He is acre the
preacher rather than the historian, his text is the eternal iusti:e;
uid his message is th-at all wrong doing is inevitably folio '.xd by
vengeance.”*

(3) Heroes and Hero-worship. (1841)

This book was originally delivered in the form of * ^ctures
on heroes and hero-worship and was printed in 1841. Carlyle was
a great hero- worshipper and burnt incense at the altar of heroes
whom he considered to be the real rulers of the world. Carlyle
had no faith in democracy, which was for him the last word of
political unwisdom. He was never weary of insisting that the
great masses of people needed the guidance and leadership of the
hero or able men. The salvation of the world lay in recognising

W, J. Long ; EagHsh Literature.

( 142 )

the leadership of the heroes and acting according to their dictates.
**Great men/' he wrote in Sartor Resartus^ •‘are the inspired Texts
of the Divine Book of Revelation where of a chapter is compiled
from epoch to epoch and by some named History." In Carlyle’s
opinion the best way t6 arrive at the truth of history was to study
the biography of the great men ‘‘for universal history is at bottom'
the history df the great men who have worked here."

In Heroes and Hero-worship Carlyle directs our attention to
heroes drawn from six branches of life. He presents six types of
heroes (1) The Hero as Divinity, having for its general subject
Odin, “the type Norseman" who had been later on deified by his
countrymen, (2) The hero as Prophet, dealing with Mahomet
and the rise of Islam, (3) The Hero as Poet, in which Dante and
Shakespeare are chosen as models, (4) The Hero as priest or
religious leader, in which Luther stands out as the Hero of the
Reformation and Knox as the hero of Puritanism, (5) The Hero as
Man of Letters concentrating on Johnson, Rousseau and Burns.
(6) The Hero as king in which- Cromwell and Napoleon 6gure
prominently. “It is needless to say that Heroes is not a book of
history; neither is it scientifically written in the manner of Gibbon.
The book abounds in errors; but they are the errors of carelessness
and arc perhaps of small consequence. With the modern idea of
history as the growth of freedom among all classes, he has no
sympathy. At certain periods, according to Carlyle, God sends
us geniuses, sometimes as priests or poets, sometimes as soldiers
or statesmen, but in whatever guise they appear, they are our real
rulers. The book abounds in startling ideas, expressed with origi-
nality and power and is pervaded throughout by an atmosphere
of intense moral earnestness."*

Carlyle’s style in this book is comparatively easier than in his
other works and the colloquial tone of the author can be felt almost
throughout the work. Still here and there we have “insistent,
teasing, rubbing-the-readcr’s-nose-in-it style which is the mark of
all that Carlyle writes."**

(4) Past and Present. (1843)

This book is the most penetrating and influential of all the
* W J. Long : English Literature

•• Daichfi : A Cnticul HistcTy of English Lite* ature. Volume IL

( 143 )

many books which were inspired by the critical, social and industrial
conditions prevalent during the Victorian Age. Carlyle completely
repudiated the spirit of contemporary England in this monumental
work. , *‘It is’', he wrote to John Sterling, ‘'a moral, political,
historical and a most questionable red-hot indignant thing for my
heart is sick to look at the things now going on in England.” A
medieval monastic community governed by Abbot Samson is
chosen as an ideal society for the materialistic people of the
Victorian Age. Carlyle presents, with all the impassioned iseal of
a Hebrew prophet, his denunciation of the many evils rising out ot
the worship of the ‘*mud-gods of modern civilisation.” Here,
Carlyle denounces scientific materialism and utilitarianism which
went along with it. In fact all sinister isms such as dilettanism,
mammonism, hedonism, utilitarianism, imperialism meet hammer-
blows at his powerful hands.

( 5 ) Oliver Cromweirs Letters and Speeches (1845)

Cromwell was Carlyle's hero and in this work he seeks to
present the greatness of the Puritan leader who exercised great
influence on the life of the English people for a number of years
in the seventeenth century. Cromwell had been a subject of great
controversy and many historians had denounced him in rabid
terms, Carlyle comes to the rescue of Cromwell in this book and
salvages the lost reputation of the great lord protector who
raised the prestige of England in foreign countries, though his
greatness at home . s a mere shadow of his greatness abroad.

(6) The Life of Sterling (1851)

CromweWs Letters and Speeches won popular applause and
gave him an incentive to write The Lije of Sterling. “It is a fine
biography recounting the life of Sterling who had exercised a
great influence on Carlyle’s spiritual and moral fierce worship or
hot intensity that inform most of Carlyle’s works. There is an
atmosphere of spiritual calm, curiously unlike the prevalent mood
of the writer.”^

(7) History of Fredrick the Great. (1858-65)

Carlyle’s interest in Germao thought brought him to the
study of Fredrick the Great, one of the greatest historical figures
of Germany for all times to come. Carlyle went over to Germany

* ComploD-Kickatt ; A History of EDglisli Litaratuie.

( 144 )

to study first-hand details connected with the great Prussian king.
He produced a detailed history of Fredrick the Great in six
volumes. It is the greatest intellectual feat performed by Carlyle.
‘‘The book severely taxed Carlyle's powers as we may believe when
we consider its scope and content; and it is one of hardest to
construe of the author’s writings, largely because Carlyle's
mannerisms of style are nowhere more abundant.”

(8) Letters and Reminiscences.

Carlvle’s Letters and Reminiscences are of great importance

since they throw a flood of light on his life and character. His

literary essays on Burns, Scott, Goethe, Byron reveal him as a
critic. Carlyle’s t)pinions on English men of letters are expressed
from a personal point of view and are often one-sided and preju-
diced. They are more valuable as a revelation of Carlyle him-
self than as an objective study of the author under consideration.

Q. 32. Give your estimate of Thomas Carlyle as a liter ry
artist.

Alls. Thomas f:arlyle, the many-sided genius, is well-
reflected in his works. He comes before the readers in various
capacities; as a literary artist, a critic of literature, as a seer, as a
prophet, as a political thinker and finally as an historian. We shall
discuss Carlyle primarily as a literary artist in this question.

As a IJtcrary Artist.

C.arlyle did not have a high opinion of art and spoke
contemptuously of art, as art. He had no patience with the
merely bookish side of litera^ture nor with the glorification of
beauty and art for its own salli^ Though Carlyle had no high
opinion of art such as was held by the Pre-Raphaelites, yet
he was in his own way one of the greatest literary artists that
England had produced during the Victorian Age. Carlyle liked to
be considered as a moralist rather than as an artist, but posterity
has come to fix its attention not on the moralist in Carlyle but on
the great unconscious artist beneath his garbs as a prophet.

As a literary artist Carlyle stands very high in the portrayal
of graphic, vivid and clear pictures. He is a pictorial artist, and
the pictures that he has left behind in prose arc more colourful
and picturesque than many of the paintings bequeathed to posterity

( 145 )

by painters in colour. Henry James saw deeper into the matter
and said that **Carlyle was in essence not a moralist at all but an
artist; picturesqueness in men and nature was what be cared for
in all the things. He was, in fact, a painter who followed the
good and evil of the world as a painter does his pigments for the
opportunities they give for the display of his pictorial powers.”
('arlyle’s art in pictorial painting of landscape and hill-side is as
well marked out as his portrayal of human character. His pictures
of the hills and the rivers ire as picturesque as those of men whom
he had known. Here are a few examples. ^‘The hills stand snow-
[)owdered, pale, bright. The black hailstorm awakens in them,
rushes down like a black swift ocean tide; valley answering valley,
and again the sun blinks out, and the poor sower is casting his
grain into the furrow, hopeful he that the Zodiacs and far
Heavenly Horologes have not faltered; that these will be yet
another summer added for us and another harvest.”

His pictures of men are no less revealing. Like a skilled
jeweller in words he presents Danton, Robespierre, Bacon,
Shakespeare, f.oleridge and a great many other figures whom he
knew intimately. The following felicities of expression exhibit
the art of a skilled jewller in words, “Bacon sees — Shakespeare
secs through.” “Swift carried sarcasm to an epic pitch.” “Coleridge
was like an engine of a hundred horse power with the boiler
burst.” “Carlyle’s vivid power ot expression enables us to accom-
pany his sonorous personality through a long period of the
nineteenth century; and the incomparable keenness of the vision
of his all-devouring eyes catches for us in lightning flashes, or
depicts in finished portraits, the great figures of his age.”

Carlyle’s Style.

Carlyle's early crude and rugged prose-style stands contras-
red with the richness and resonance of his latter style and the
difference is mainly due to the immense vocabulary he had
acquired and the most farfetched phrases of remote allusions that he
had come to command with the passage of time. In his later years
f arlyle had a complete command of the English languages. Langu-
age was a play-thing in his hands and he toyed with his ideas in the
manner he liked. Like Sir Thomas Browne and jermy Taylor, the
great prose-writers of the seventeenth century, Carlyle cultivated a

( t46 )

prose-style in which splendour, music and resonance played an
important part. Like these seventeenth century writers his prose*
had much of the splendour and music which makes English ima-
ginative prose a magnificent organ of expression. The enor*
mous wealth of vocabulary employed by Carlyle in constructing
sentences sometimes short, sometimes long, marked with breaks
and abrupt turns, apostrophies and exclamations, is unique in
prose literature. At places such a style gives the impression of
uncouthness and roughness but it cannot be disassociated with
Carlyle for it is his habitual manner of writing. The habit of
writing in a peculiarly controverted style with a rhapsody of
denunciation, vituperation, scoffs and jeers, pathos and self-
mockery and rablasion touches is something unique with the man
and has not been cultivated by any other writer in the English
language.

Carlyle cultivated different kinds of style suiting his subjecc-
matter. In the French Revolution he cultivated a highly
picturesque and poetic style marked with vividness and flashing
light of colour. The jostling metaphors are not merely picturesque
but energetic and convey a sense of the cataclysm that shook
Europe with a thundering force. In this book Carlyle employs a
symphony of musical sounds so that we hear a rushing vociferous
piece of orchestral music, resonant with trumpets and battle cries.
In Sartar Resartus there is the presence of a highly philosophical
style marked with complexities of thought and ruggedness of
expression, sometimes confused and sometimes suffering from
Grammatical lapses. The style becomes peculiarly Carlylessc —
“a disturbing, bewildering and often exasperating style’’; '*a style
full of un-English idiom, of violent inversions, startling pauses,
and sharp angularities — a style which he employed to rouse the
attention of his reader by a scries of electric shocks,”

In the ‘Life of Sterling’ and ‘Fredrick the Great* Carlyle
wielded a style atonce matured and restrained, proceeding with
absolute certainty of touch.

On the whole, Carlyle’s style is picturesque and he is rightly
considered the Rambiaiidt of English prose. No other writer of
the Victorian age wrote with that pictutesqueness and force which
Carlyle employed in the expression of his philosophical, Iitci*iry

( 147 )

and economic thoughts. His descriptive power and power of charac-
terisation are really remarkable. The way in which he employed
sarcasm, irony, invective, rhetoric and exhortation, sometimes in
a conversational manner and sometimes in a pedagogic fashion,
make him a great creator of an English prose style which
few could imitate, for few writers had the intense moral fervour,
and depth of feeling which Carlyle experienced when he gave
expression to his thoughts.

Q 33. Cive your estimate of Carlyle as a literary critic and
a Prophet of his age.

Ans. Carlyle was not a great criric of literature and the
few observations that lie has made about English men of letters
are one-sided, and exhibit his personal likes and dislikes. He was
obsessed by the biographical stand-point, and judged works of art
and literary value from this standard. In his view there
was nothing belter than a good biography and he considered
that, “there is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a
biography,” and conversely ‘^thecc is no life of man, faithfully
recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort thymed or unrhymed.”*

This conviction deeply influenced (Carlyle’s criticism. He
judged an author in relation to the exhibition of the inner spirit in
his work. He always sought the Man behind his work. He had
words of great admiration and applause for those authors who
revealed themselves in their works and brought out the light of
the spirit in their master creations. His critical essays arc, in fact,
an attempt to get at the Man beneath his literary trappings whether
it be Richtor or Burns or Scott or Johnson.

Carlyle could reach the heart of the subject and present
the real truth about an author by his penetrative insight into
his works. His penetration and reach were no doubt very great,
and he could strike at the root of the matter in a trenchant and
telling phrase. We can appreciate the reach of his observations
in his remarks on Bacon, Swift and Coleridge. How pregnant
are his observations, caa he judged by his following remarks:
(1) Bacon sees, Shakespeare sees through. (2) Swift carried sar-

* Carlyle’^ Essay on Sir Walter Scott.

( 148 )

casm to an epic pitch. (3) Coleridge was a steam engine of a
hundred horse- power with the boiler-burst. (4) Goethe is the
greatest genius that has lived for a century and the greatest ass
that has lived for three.

Greater than a literary critic is Carlyle’s work as a critic of
his age. He was the prophet of his age, and viewed the social,
economic and political life of his times from the view point of a
seer and a philosopher. He seemed to be dissatisfied with
the material glory, power and pelf of the rich capitalists of
his time. As a critic of his age we find Carlyle condemning the
so-called material progress of the age and the insistence of the
people on the mechanical view of life. He poured the vials of his
wrath upon the easy going optimism which had been bred by
rapidly developing commercial prosperity of the age and denounced
with the impassioned zeal of a Hebrew prophet the idolatorous
worship of the mud-gods of modern civilisation. He attacked
‘‘the mechanical view of life, mechanical education, mechanical
government, mechanical religion and preached, now with drollery
and paradox, now with fiery earnestness and prophetic possession,
a return to sincerity in all things.”*

It was Carlyle’s aim as a critic of Victorian society to expose
the shams and hypocrisies of the Mcmmon-worshippcrs of the age
and subject their idols of life to the hammer-blows of his fiery
denunciation. Throughout the Past and Present and Sartor
Hesartus Carlyle’s dissatisfaction with his age, particularly with
the social, political and economic values upheld by the philistincs,
is clearly brought out, and one cannot fail to be impressed by the
earnestness and sincerity of the author who attacked them merci-
lessly with the vigour of a saint, a prophet and a preacher.

Not only was Carlyle a critic of his age, but he was also a
reformer, a preacher and a sage with a definite programme for
bringing about the moral elevation of the Memmon-woishippers ot
the age. He preached throughout his life the lessons of morality,
sincerity, truthfulness and virtue. He exhorted the people of his
times to rise above material power and pelf and realise the spiri-
tual value of noble ideals of virtue and dignity of labour. With
great sincerity, he exhorted the people of his times to lay aside

* Moody-Loveit : A History of English Literhtuie

( )

hypocrisy and to think and speak and live for the ideal ot truth.
He preached God and spiritual freedom of the only life-giving
truths. He gave his advice at the top of his voice, sometimes with
more emphasis than was needed and popularly came to be known
as the ‘shouting prophet’. Carlyle spoke disturbingly, if not
always luminously to the troubled Victorian conscience. He could
not indeed turn back the currents ot his age inspire of his moral
earnestness and sincerity of purpose. “Carlyle’s failure to impose
his narrow, rigoristic, moralistic, joyless Annandalc view of the
world upon the world, added an element of tragedy to his deeply
tragic sense of life. He sudered also the deeper tragedy of those
w^ho attempt to deify the universe; who personify it as a God to
iind that they have made a Devil of it. Their cosmic piety plunges
them into such abysses of moral contradiction that it becomes, as
many believe it became with Carlyle, a mask of atheism and dark
despair.”*

Q. 34. Write a note on Carlyle as a political thinker and
an historian.

Ans, As a political thinker Carlyle was opposed to libera-
lism and the growing tide of democracy. He had no faith in
democracy which was tor him the best word of political unwisdom,
lie was never weary of insisting that the great masses of the people
needed the guidance and leadership of the hero or able men.
Carlyle cultivated the personality cult and laid emphasis more on
obedience to men of authority and heroic mettle rather than
fruitlessly for rights in a democratic . society. Carlyle
considered democracy as a government of the fools. He believed
in the gospel of might and the strong man. In his view the strong
man was one who had spiritual convictions and strength of mind
and soul. He had no belief in physical strength and applauded
‘Strength of character and mind. Those who were strong in
charactet and spiritual convictions were worthy to be the rulers of
our society. Carlyle had faith in heroes and geniuses rather
fban the democratic masses governed by passion and hysterical
emotions.

As an historian Carlyle was not interested in recording the
* l^ogan Pearsall Smith— Fbomas Carlyle ; The Rembrandt of Eogli&h Prose.

( 150 )

dry-as-dust facts of history in a systematic manner. He was not
a historian who cared for meticulous accuracy in the presentation
of historical facts and in bringing out all the dust and scum that
gathered round historical events. Carlyle was interested not so
much in the events of history as in the heroes who gave
them their vital significance. For him history was an
interesting record of soul-stirring events manipulated by men of
strength and character. His histoticil method was to concentrate
mainly on the biographical details of great souls for in his view it
was by studying the lives of great heroes, who moulded the desti-
nies of a nation, that a better idea of history could be secured.
Albert directs our attention to the basic facts about Carlyle’s
ircalincnt of history in the following words. “Oarlyle’s method
was essentially biographical — he sought out the ‘hero’, the super-
man who could benevolently dominate his follows, and compel
thein to do better. Such were his Crom well and his Fredrick. His
other aim was to make history alive. He denounced the ‘Dry-as-
dust’ who killed the recorded inhnite detail of life and opinion and
by means of his masculine imagination and pithy style he brought
the subject vividly lo his reader’s eye.”

Q. 35. Give a brief account of (lie main works of John
Ruskin (1819-1900).

Ans. John Ruskin was one of the greatest thinkers and
writers of the Victorian Age. He was “a man of high moral
principles, of splendid though ill co-ordinated intellectual power,
of luxuriant imagination, all of which qualities he turned on to a
rich variety of subject matter.” He produced works of lasting
value on a variety of subjects such as art, music, education and
literature. Ruskin’s works are voluminous and threading through
them is like passing through a luxuriant garden, rich in fruit and
flowers emanating fine fragrance from all quarters in such an over-
cloying measure that one is likely to be detained by the loveliness
of the first flower, the first blossoming tree in its vernal beauty,
rather than proceed ahead to enjoy greater beauties at the farther
end. Ruskin’s w^orks on art, social and political economy, litera-
ture and education are worthy of gi.v.at consideration and will be
treated one by one under the following heads : —

I 151 )

fl) Works on Art

Among Ruskin’s works on art, the most significant are :
Modern Painters (1843-60), Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849),
Stones of Venice (1851-53).

Modern Painters (1843-60).

Ruskin began as an art critic with the publication of five
volumes of Modern Painters between 1843-60. The genesis of
this famous work was Ruskin's desire to uphold Turner’s paintings
against the bitter attacks on his splendid works. Originally the
work was a defence of Turner and an attack on his critics, but it
developed into a comprehensive discussion of the principles of
painting, especially landscape painting. “Huskt i is more elo 4 uein
and more charming when he is dealing with landscapes and descri-
bing the ways in which the imagination can respond to the subtle
details of colour and form in the natural world than in endeavour-
ing to make a direct connection between art and morality.”* The
first volume was published in 1843, the second in 1846, the third
and fourth in 1856 and the fifth in 1860. In these five volumes
Ruskin presented his views about European painters and dealt with
theories of art and different orders of landscape painters such as
Heroic (Titian), Classical (Poussin), Asioral (Cuyp), Contempla-
tive (Turner), The study of these volumes brings out Ruskin’s
attitude towards art and its relation to morality. Here are to be
noticed his insistence on beauty, imitation of nature and the moral
values of art. Ruskin also discussed the relation of painting
with history, religion and social conditions. Nothing in the book,
however, was so praiseworthy as his style. The descriptions of
Alpine scenery, the appreciation of great paintings such as
Turner’s Slave-ship and Tintoretto’s Crucifixion represent Ruskin s
command of the English language particularly in its rhetorical
side. The caustic denunciation of bad art, such as the analysis
of Wonverman’s ‘Landscajlie with a Hunting Party’ is trenchant,
forceful and vigorous and exhibits the author’s utmost dislike for
slipshod work and work of bad art. Here and there are a few digre-
ssion in the book, for example the chapter on ‘Vulgarity’ and the
suggestive discussion of ^Pathetic Fallacy’ but these disgressions

■ David Daiches : A Critical History of English Literaiure.

( 152 )

are interesting in-as-niuch-as they reveal Ruskin’s finest critical
manner.

Seven Lamps of Architecture.

In the Seven Lamps of Architecture Ruskin deals with the
leading principles of architecture. The seven lamps are those
of Sacrifice, Truth, Power, Beauty, Life, Memory and Obedience.
It is one of the least ornate of Ruskin's book, but it is one of the
best reasoned. In this work Ruskin puts up a spirited defence of
Oothic as the noblest and the finest style of architecture, and
labours to relate art and morality. “The amount of sheer
patient recording and cataloguing that has gone into his work on
architecture reveals an immense tenacity of purpose : a quality
which is not particularly rare, but one which can easily become
mechanical. What is extremely rare is to find it allied with per-
petual vitality and sensitiveness
Stones of Venice.

In Stones of Venice Ruskin explains the rise and virtue of
the Gothic in terms of the moral virtues of the society that pro-
duced it and attributes its decline to the disappearance of that
virtue. Throughout this work we find the author glorifying
Gothic architecture and denouncing the pestelential art of the
Renaissance, and advocating the demolition of the remnants of
the Renaissance art.

The Stones of Venice is rich in passages of beautiful des-
cription, particularly about Venice and its panoramic surround-
ings. The description of St. Mark's Cathedral is one of the finest
passages of loveliness and beauty in English prose.

From art Ruskin drifted to social and political subjects
and his works on political economy are w’^orthy of close
examination.

Unto I his Last (1860-62).

This work was first contributed to Cornhill Magazine in the
form of articles, but so great was the outcry at the novel economic
views of the author that Thackeray, the editor of the Magazine,
had to dis-continue the publication of Ruskin's papers. It was
later on published by a daring publisher after its appearance in
FraseVs Magazine edited by Froude. The work consists of four

• Graham Hough ; The Last Romantics.

( 153 )

essays : (1) The roots of Honour, (2) The veins of wealth, (3) Qui
Judicates Terram (4) Ad Valorem. In these essays Ruskin deals
with the problem of wages, the relation of the employers and the
labourers and the true nature of wealth consisting not in material
products but in, “the producing of as many as possible full-
breathed, bright-eyed and happy hearted human creatures.” The
entire work is, in fact, an attack on the prevalent system of politi-
cal economy. The main aim of the author is to expose the '
materialism of the age and to draw the attention of the industria-
lists and the leaders of the state to give more attention to the
spiritual side of man’s life than merely to his physical needs.

Ruskin's Unto This Last was considered at the time of its
publication as the beautiful vapouring of an impractical idealist.
To the materialists of the age interested in money earning the
work seemed certainly impractical, but the latter socialists found a
hard core of wisdom in the book and worked out its tenets in
actual practice. Much of what Ruskin had set out to propound
is now an accomplished fact and in socialistic countries the
message of Unto This Last has been imbibed in the fullest
measure possible. It is increasingly recognised that machines tend
to demoralise and dehumanise man and that means must be sought
to 'make man the master and not the servant of the machines.

The great value of this work lies mainly in the direction of
labour reform. Ruskin chalks out a full programme for improv-
ing the conditions of labourers and their relationships with the
capitalists. The author stresses the need of establishing training
schools for labourers and pleads for the eradication of unemploy-
ment from the ranks of the workers by providing them opportu-
nities for work. For the old and infirm workers Ruskin advocates
the establishment of comfortable homes where they may be able
to receive proper attention. All this has to be done in justice and
not in charity because “the labour serves his country as truly as
does soldier or statesman and a pension should be no more dis-
graceful in one case than in the other.”

Munera Pulveris ( 1862-63)

This work consists of a series of articles on political economy
published in Fraser^ s Magazine (1862-63), the remainder of which
was suppressed by popular clamour. The work was published in book

( 1S4 )

form in 1872- It purports to be an ‘accurate analysis of the laws
of political Economy’, and the prevailing conceptions about wealth
of Ruskin attacks the conceptions of wealth which were held dear
by orthodox economists. He condemns and criticises the out-
moded theories of political economists and suggests that true
political economy ought to be a branch of sociology because
ultimately there is no wealth but life. In a sense Munera Puheris
is an elaboration of the principles, generally negative, laid
down in Unto this Last,

Time and Tide (1867).

Time and Tide is mainly in the form of letters addressed to
one Dixon, a working wood-cutter. The author lays emphasis on
social regeneration rather chan mere political reform such as was
brought about by the second Reform Bill. In this book Ruskin
seeks to point out that the condition of England in its social and
economic side was a matter of greater attention and concern than
merely giving political rights and establishing constituencies and
ballot boxes. The work principally deals with the problem of
poverty and its removal from society.

The Crown of Wild Olive (1866).

The work consists of four lectures delivered in 1866 — the
first On fVar, delivered at the Royal Military Academic; the second
on the Future of Englcmi at the Royal Artillery Institute, the third
On Work to a working men’s institute; the fourth in the Bredford
Town-hall on Traffic^ in the sense of buying and selling. In the
lecture On War Ruskin exhibits the importance of war and its
relation to the development of art. All great art is developed
during a period of war and is ruined in a state of peace. In the
Future of England the voice of the prophet is heard. In this work
he exhorts the labourers to realise the dignity of labour and
pleadingly admonishes the capitalists to be considerate towards
their workers. In Traffic he deals with the problem of architec-
ture. Ruskin had been invited to talk about the New Exchange
building that the capitalists were about to build. Inviting the
author the industrialists had hoped that he would give advice on
the latest style of architecture. Instead of gratifying his hosts by
praising their scheme and eulogising the architecture they were
intending to set up, Ruskin in a satirical manner attacked the

( )

materialism of the industrialists and replied to their welcome
address that a style of architecture grew out of a way of life and
could not be delivered by a visiting expert. Though the tone of
the lectnre is friendly yet it is marked with bitter irony. Ruskin
pointed out that all good architecture was the expression of
national life and character, and was produced by prevalent and
eager national taste or desire for beauty, lie elaborated his view
point by stating that only noble and good persons of virtue were
capable of producing good works of architecture. Me illustrated
his point by condemning the evil Renaissance art because it was
based on luxury, and eulogised Gothic architecture because ii
^ as the product of individual workers who were noble and good
at heart. Ruskin’s view point i^ not unheld today and it is
seriously doubted whether he was at all justified in making a
sweeping generalisation about morality and its relationship to
architecture.

Sesame and Lilies (1885).

This great work deals with the study of books and the
position of women in society. The sub-titles of the work arc Of
King^s Treasuries and Of Queen's Garden. In the first part of King's
Treasuries Ruskin takes us to the realm of books and considers
them to be ‘King’s Treasuries’. He examines ‘books ol the Hour’
and ‘books of all times', and exhorts the readers to study
hooks of all times” for they contain the precious life-blood
of an author. In the second part ‘Of Queen’s Garden,’ be consi-
ders the question of woman’s place and education which Tennyson
had attempted to answer in The Princess. Ruskin’s theory is that
the purpose of all education is to acquire power to bless and to
redeem human society; and that in this noble work woman n ust
always play the leading part. Ruskin is always at his best in
writing of women or for women, and the lofty idealism of this
essay, together with its rare beauty of expression, makes it, on the
whole, the most delightful and inspiring of his works.

To these two lectures Ruskin had added The Mystery of Life.
It is a personal essay dealing with his own failures. The tone of
rhis essay is pessimistic and sad, and differs from the spirit of the
two lectures. On the whole, the work is penned in a masterly

( 156 )

manner and is the one single^ example of the author's mastery
over the manifold chords of prose expression.

Praetcria (1885-89).

Ruskin’s last work Praeteria is an unfinished autobiography.
It was published during 1885-89. Ruskin presents glimpses of his
boyhood days, his early training and a few sketches of his life as
a school-boy. He portrays delightful pictures of his father, mother,
aunts and even servants. As a revelation of the inner life of the
author it is in the same line as Rousseau’s Confessions,

Q. 36. Give your estimate of John Ruskin as a critic of art
and literature.

Ans. Ruskin began his career as a critic of art embracing
in his sweep the study of painting and architecture in a special
way and all other arts in a general way. In the Seven Lamps of
Architecture, Stones of Venice, and the lecture on Traffic in the
Crown of Wiid Olive he dealt with the problems of architecture
and its relation to morality and human life. He emphasised that
good architecture was produced by men of noble and awakened
conscience. Only in a highly virtuous society could good works
of architecture be produced. He upheld Gothic architecture
as the noblest and the finest example of good and virtuous buil-
ders of the past and condemned the architecture of the Renai-
ssance and the commercial architecture of his own times. Ruskin’s
view point has not been upheld by modern thinkers, and it is
stated that “the history of art can show periods of splendour when
there was abundant moral depravity. Ruskin over-emphasises the
correspondence between art and morality.”*

It was in the field of painting that Ruskin exhibited his
originality of conception and novelty of approach. He introduced
the principle of N'aturalism in judging works of Art, particularly
painting. The success of the artist lay in faithfully representing
Nature. “The more I think of it,” he says, “I find- jhis conclu-
sion more impressed upon me — that the greatest thing a human
soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it
saw in plain way."* Judged by this principle of Naturalism, he
found Turner, Tinteret, Verenose, as supreme artists for in

* Comptoo-RIcketc; AHistoiyot Goglish Utermture.

( 157 )

their paintings there was the representation of Truth and fidelity
to Nature. “Ruskin’s value as an art critic lay chiefly in the
impulse he gave to his generation to appreciate the beauty
of natural phenomena; he showed them the absurdity of
confounding the grandeur of Nature merely with her big scenic
effects, when a blade of grass or an ordinary cloud could reveal as
richly ihe possibilii ies of beauty.*’*

Ruskin approached Painting from another aspect as well. He
showed ‘‘that painting should be something more than an ingenious
arrangement of pigments.” It was not merely the irrangcment of
colour that gave to painting its real worth. Sincerity and truthful-
ness to the representation of Nature were to be valued more than
the splashing of colour.

No amount of technical skill exhibited by an artist in
painting or in architecture satisfied Ruskin. He was no appreciaror
of technical excellence and in his view the worth of painting was
judged not by its craftsmanship, but by its general impression of
goodness left on the, reader's mind. Here is Ruskin himself stating
his view in an unmistakable language. “Taste for any pictures or
statues is not a moral quality, but taste for good ones is. Only
here again wc have to define the word “good”. 1 don’t mean by
“good” clever, or learned — difficult in the doing. Take a picture by
Teniers, of sots quarrelling over their dice : it is an entirely clever
picture; so clever that nothing in its kind has ever been done
.equal to it; but is also an entirely base and evil picture. It is an
expression of delight in the prolonged contemplation of a wild
thing and delight in that is an “unm inncred”, or “immoral”
quality. It is ‘ bad taste in the profoundcst sense — it is the taste
of the devils.”

— Technically perfect, clever, even unsurpassable; but not
worth Ruskin's appreciation.

“On the other hand,” says Ruskin, “a picture of Titian’s,
or a Greek statue, or a Greek coin or a Turner landscape, expre-
sses delight in the perpetual contemplation of a good and perfect
thing. That is an entirely moral quality — it is the taste of . the
angels.”

As a critic of Art in general, Ruskin, like Plato, allied Art

• iSd.™

( 158 )

to Morality and disfavoured the theory of art for art’s sake. He
t^ave to Art an ethical significance. *‘He believed that the springs
of art lay far deeper into the moral nature of the artist and in the
moral temper of the age and nation which produced it.”* **He
was the first to judge work of art as if they were human actions,
having moral and intellectual qualities, as well as the aesthetic;
and he saw their total effect as the result of all those qualities and
of the condition of the society in which they were produced.”**

Ruskin was opposed to the theory of art for art’s sake. He
believed that art and morality were closely allied and were vary-
ing manifestations of the same divine impulse; beauty being a
consecrated revelation of God in the same measure as the expre-
ssions of morality in spiritually advanced souls

To sum up, Ruskin’s view of art and its relation to human
society is based on the following four principles (as pointed out by
R. P. Me Cutcheon and W. H. Vam) —

(1) The object of art, as of every other human endeavour,
is to find and to express the truth.

(2) Art, in order to be true, must break away from
conventionalities and copy nature.

(3) Morality is closely allied with art, and that a careful
study of any art reveals the moral strength, or weakness of the
people that produced it.

(4) The main purpose of art is not to delight a few cul-
tured people but to serve the daily uses of common life.

Ruskin was not a great critic of literatuic like Matthew
Arnold. His literary criticisms are sporadic and unsystematic.
He adjudged authors by the same principle of Naturalism and
morality that he applied to Art. He expressed his opinion on
Homer, Shakespeare and Scott, hi the licld of literary criticism
he suffered from the same short coming of ^excessive self-
confidence’ which marred his criticism of Art. He was often full
of prejudice and presented one-sided pictures. Yet his criticism
has its own place and Hugh Walker in the Literature of the Victorian
Era, appraises it properly in the following words — ‘‘We may
think his praise of Scott excessive, his appreciation of Shelley

* Moody-Loveli : A History of Foglisb Literature.

Arthur Clutton Brock : Kuikin.

( 159 )

inadequate. We may think the colours lurid in which he paints
Dickens and the other novelists who represent ‘foul hetion*. W e
may differ from him in a thousand ways; but the fact remains that
his criticism is always stimulating and that wc learn more from
him even when he is most wrong-headed than wc do from multi-
tudes of criticisms to which no exception can be taken, but which
lack the vitalising quality of Ruskin.”*

Q. 37. Write a note on John Ruskin as a literary artist
and his prose style.

Ans. Ruskin was a great literary artist and his soul was
■stirred at the sight of beauty. He was moved to ecstasy at the
sight of grandeur and loveliness in qature. He presented graphic
and pictorial pictures of nature which rivalled the paintings of
Pre-Raphaelites. He had been endowed with unerring perception
of a meticulous artist, and God had given him the gilt of building
a whole picture, stroke by stroke, till the edilice reared by him
seemed to be a monument of perfection and exquisite beauty, lie
cultivated the qualities of truth and sincerity in his artistic repre-
sentations of nature and presented pictures which have not been
rivalled by other word painters except, perhaps, by a tew
Pre Raphaelitc poets like Rossetti and Morris.

Ruskin's Prose Style.

Ruskin was a superb master of the English language and
he handled it with perfect ease, wielding a style in complete
conformity and harmony with his needs. Generally speaking, his
prose is in the tradition of poetic prose practised by De Quincey.
In his prose works we come across super-abundance of figures
of speech, excessiveness of imagery, ornateness, melody, grandeur
and loftiness of expression. “His passages abound in purple
passages, which are marked by sentences of immense length, care-
fully punctuated by a gorgeous march of image and epithet, and
by a sumptuous rhythm that sometimes grows into actual blank
Verse capable of scansion.’’**

Ruskin abounds in the other harmonies of ptose and though

* Hugh Walker : The Literature of the Victotiao bra.

Essays froiB Piedrlck Harrison.

( 160 )

Cyril Connoly criticised his sonorous, ornate and polyphonic style
in T/7e Enemies of Promisey yet it cannot be denied that the
criticism appears to be wide of the 'mark in case with Ruskin
whose lofty thoughts and dignified constructive progra names
needed a dignified vesture which he fitly employed for the expre-
ssion of his thoughts. Ruskin provides a nice escape fot. readers
who seem to be bored by English prose written in a dull,
matter of fact and pedestrian style. Ruskin’s sonorous, dignified
poetic prose comes as a welcome relief after going through the
prosaic writings of many dull authors.

Huskin’s place, in fact, is not among the writers of dull
prose, but among those great masters who had given to English
prose its emotional and poetic qualities. Ruskin is among the
romantic renovators of English prose and is in the same line as
Gibbon, Burke and De Quincey. Whatever could be effected by*
a gorgeous embroidery of words, whatever could be achieved by
a lyrical effusion of passion, whatever was possible to a painter,
with his command of da^iszling colour; whatever music could be
produced by a symphony of sound, was within the competence
of Ruskin. In his prose, for the first time, we come across a
happy blend of the eye of the landscape painter and the trained
ear of a musician.

Ruskin was at heart a prophet and prophets do not gene-
rally speak or write the language that ordinary human beings
employ in the expression of their commonplace thoughts. The
Oracle of Delphi did not speak like the common citizens of
Greece. Ruskin was a man of very sensitive nature and his soul
was stirred to the innermost recess by the nobility of his subjects.
He naturally employed the language of Biblical earnestness and
exquisite beauty in the expression of his noble and profound
thoughts. His style could be consciously poetic with an accumu-
lation of clauses in a periodic sentence ending with a calculated
close. Ruskin could also achieve lyric simplicity and fine direct-
ness in some passages of Praeteria and Fors Ciavigera.

In short, Ruskin as a prose writer, ^^improved upon the
example set by Landor, De Quincey, and the Romantic renovators
of English prose; he still increased the range of its effects, by
adding to harmony and animation the resources of the itichest

( 161 )

imagination and colouring. Always poetic, his style is not always
in perfect taste; it shows at times oratorical cadences, a super
abundant wealth of words, and superfluous ornaments. The
impression of a too continuous and pressing, eloquence, which it
leaves with the reader is bound up with the very sincerity of a
zeal which is never half in earnest, whatever convictions it may
adopt. This rhetoric and this monotony do not, however, take
away their charm to their overpowering force force from Ruskin’s
magnificent evocations, from bis grand landscapes, transfused with
the spirit of the highest pantheistic sublimity, nor even from his
passages of masterly analysis, with all their picturesque precision
of touch, their energy in the handling of detail. Through this
exuberance of rhythmic and sonorous language there tuns a more
familiar, mote spontaneous vein where the artist most happily
reconciles forcefulness with simplicity like the Fors Clavigeta.”*

Q. 38. Write a note on Rnskin as a social reformer and a
critic of the society of bis times.

Ans. Ruskin’s early career was mainly devoted to the
criticism of Arts, and he was a ‘singularly erratic art critic. He
co-related acts to society, and it Vas his deepseated conviction that
the arts should be regarded as the expression of the social milieu.
At about forty, Ruskin shifted his interest from Arts to society and
became a critic of the society of his times. Ruskin gave up
criticism of art for criticism of society “because no one could go
on painting pictures in a burning house.” “For my own part”
wrote Ruskin, “I have seceded from the study not only of acchi*
tectuie, but neatly of all art, and have given myself, as I would in
a besieged city, to seek the best modes of getting bread and water
for the multitudes, there remaining no question, it seems to me,
of other than such grave business for the time.” From 1860
onwards he produced books dealing mainly with the problems of
his age. The period to which he is to be related as a social critic was
the period when industrialism was at the height of its power. His
social tirades were against the mid-years of the golden age of British

* Lsgottis and Cszamiao : A History of English Uieiatun.

** O. C Lctoy : John Ruskin.

( 162 )

capitalism. Riiskin was one of the many Victorians who .turaed
with a new seriousness to social c|uestions when they fpupd the
beliefs of religion failing them in the turmoil of economic uproar
in , the country.

In , Ruskin’s social criticisms we not only notice the
concern of the reformer for the outer maladies of the age,
but also an expression of the inner tensions and neurosis of
his own soul. *‘The fact is that in his social criticism Ruskin was
often not dealing primarily with outer reality, but was resolving
tensions and releasing aggressions of bis own subconscious
nature.”* His was a pathological case in many ways, and it was
all good for England’s social life. **The tone, the emotional power,
and to a great extent the ideas of Ruskin’s social criticism are to be
explained, then, in terms of his neurotic nature.”**

Like Carlyle, Ruskin was horiihed and disgusted with the
sweeping tide of materialism and industrialism, and the sight of
mills add factories’ emitting out foul smoke and spoiling the
charm of the countryside pained him intensely and deeply. Hence
the first thing that Ruskin did was to direct the attention of
the Victorians to the evils of industrialism and to win them back
to the life of simplicity and glorification of nature. The strength of
Ruskin's social criticism lay in the clarity and force with which he
vigorously assailed the irrationalities of the industrial system. and
the debasement of human nature brought about by the poisonous
fumes of the machine system of production.

As a social reformer Ruskin sought to remove the evils of
unemployment and low wages. He made heroic efforts to bring
about healthy reforms in the living conditions of the labourers
engaged in the monotonous task of teodiog machines. He exhorted
the capitalists to improve the conditions of labourers working
in: their factories, and provide them all possible amenities of life.
He made attempts to exorcize the spectre of poverty and disease
stalking through the land. He laid emphasis on social justice and
fair distribution of wealth.

Ruskin pleaded fervently for improving the lot bfxhildren
who were sometimes, i^ubjec ted to i^nhuman practices. He protested

* Gaylord C. Lero/ : Jonu Kuskio ' J ^

•• Ibid.

( 163 )

against the employment of children in factories^ and appealed to
sentiments 6f pity and sympathy among the philanthropists
of the agc^

Comparing the Victorian spectacle of poverty amid plenty,
Ruskin came oat with a thundering tone against the capita!list
ridden soctety where every pins sign of wealth was balanced by a
minus sign of poverty, but where the pluses “make a very positive
and venerable appearance in the world,** while the minuses have,
on the ot^er hand, a tendency to retire into back streets, and other
places of shade, — or even to get themselves out of sight into
gaves.** ‘‘Though England is deafened with spinning wheels” he
cxclainis, “her people have not clothes — though she is black with
digging fuel, they die of cold — and though she has sold her soul
for gain, they die of hunger.** ’ Comparing the ethics of the
new society based on self-interest and selfishness, he denounced
the “thrice accursed, thrice impious doctrine of the modern
economist that to do the best for yourself, is finally to do the best
for others.’* * “So tar as I know** he says, “there is not in
history record of anything so disgraceful to the human intellect
as the modern idea that the commercial tei&t, ‘Buy in thd
cheapest market and sell in the dearest*. * He reminds the
people of his age that the pursuit of material gain, which is
considered by many economists as the foundation of nationsll
welfare, for Christianity the root of all evil.** “Your religion.**
he says, exhorted you to love your neighbour, but “you have
founded entire science of political economy, or what you have
stated to be the constant instinct of man~tbe desire to defrkud his
neighbour'.** * You “mock Heaven and its Powers, by pretendirtg
belief ih a revelation which asserts the love of money to be the
the root of a// evil, and declaring, at the same time, that you
are actuated in all chief deeds and measures by no other love.*’
“I know no previous instance” he says irt Vnto This Last, “in

1 Riukin 1 Unto This tast,

2 ' RUskin : Lectures on Art. '

3 ' Rt^'skih : The Crown of 'Wild Olive.

4 Ruskili ,}'Uoto T his Last.

5 Ruskin : Fors Clavigera.

( 164 )

history', of a nation’s establishing a systematic disobedience to
the first principles of its professed religion.”

Ruskin not only became a critic of his society in its
economic and social aspects, but also directed his attention ^ ^
political conditions of his age. He was as much oppose as
Carlyle to the sweeping tide of democracy and a clamour for rights
and privileges. He advocated a hierarchy of society in which each
man gave orders to those below him and in turn carried out in
obedience the wishes of captain, leader, bishop, or king. He criti
cised those political leaders who preached, * Stand up for
rights-get your division of living-be sure that you are well o
as others, and have what they have 1 don't let any man dictate to
you — have not you all a right to your opinion ? are you not all as
good as everybody else ?” Ruskin stood against this ideal of
liberty and stated in Fors Clavigera. “My own teaching has been
that Liberty, whether in the body, soul or political state of man,
is only another word for Death, and the final issue of Death,
putrefaction.” Ruskin believed in discipline rather than licence,
authority rather than defiance. The dominant point in his political
criticism is authoritarian one and this is primarily responsible
for his failure as a constructive critic. Ruskin proved to be a severe
ctitic^of the societ 7 of his times, but his voice failed to have much
effect on the mammon-worshippers of the age. The deepest
impression made by Ruskin’s social criticism as a whole, “is one
of.the pathos of an immense and tragic failure. It was a failure
of which he himself was keenly aware. Unable either to shelve
or to solve the problems of his age, he fell victim, he told Charles
Eliot Norton, to a “daily maddening rage.”* He 8*'^®*
way to “the unmeasured anger against human stupidity

which can of ten be, as John Motley Hnely says, “one of the most

provoking forms of that stupidity.”** He rages at the “money
theory” of modern times, which “corrupts the Church, corrupts
the household, destroys honour, beauty and life throu^out
the universe. It is the death incarnate of Modernism and the so-
called science of its pursuit is the most cretinous, speechless,

* Lstten tolNorton.

** Motley: Lifis of Cobdw.

( t65 )

paralyzing plague that has yet touched the brains of mankind.’’ '
He takes the preachers to task for giving support to Mill and
to Mammon. * He lashes at his countrymen for letting “the
destinies of twenty myriads of human souls” be determined by
“the chances of an enlarged or diminished interest in trade.”
His invectives become increasingly violent until they reach
the point of hysteria : “We English; as a nation, know
not, and care not to know, a single broad or basic principle
of human justice. We have only our instincts to guide us.
Wejwillfhit anybody who hits us. We will take care of our
own^families and out own pockets; and we are characterized
in our present phase of enlightenment mainly by rage in
speculation, lavish expenditure on suspicion or panic,
generosity whereon generosity is useless, anxiety for the souls
of savages, regardlessness of those of civilized nations, enthu-
siasm for, liberation of blacks, apathy to enslavement of whites,
proper horror of regicide, polite respect for populicide, sympa-
thyjwith those whom we can no longer serve, and reverence for
the dead, whom we have ourselves delivered to death.”* Sometimes
the invective turns into a shriek of loathing for “this yelping,
carnivorous crowd, mad foe money and lust, tearing each other
to pieces, and starving each other to death, and leaving heaps
of their dung and ponds of their spittle on every palace
floor and altar stone.” ^ When we read Ruskin we are
often I ; made to feel, as Leslie Stephen said, that we are
“listening to the cries of a man of genius, placed in a pillory
to be pelted by a thick-skinned mob, and urged by a sense
of his helplessness to utter the bitterest taunts he can invent.”**

1 Cook : Letter to Dr. John Brown.

2 Fdn Claviform.

^ Letler^to the Sconman Ausuftt6, 1859.

4 Works XVlf L 22S # Arrows of the Chase).

5 Works«V|l,Leitec.XLVlll(FdiiClivlieio).

6 Leslie Stephtii. : Mr. B iiskm*i Rcctoi Wriiios^’' f ratsr^s Maaazioe June 1874.

( .166 )

;,Q* Write a note on Thomas Babington Macaulay

(18<0< 85^) as an Essayist and an Hbtorian.

Ans. Thomas Babington Macaualy was one of the leading
personalites of the Victorian age. He was the main trumpter
of the material progress and industrial advancement that England
had achieved during his time. He was a man of optimistic
ternperament and viewed every form of progress with an eye of
appreciation and admiration. He was also a voracious reader,
and spent his days and nights in the pursuit of learning and
knowledge. He had gathered a rich store of information by his
patient application to history and literature, and used his know-
ledge to his advantage both in his Essays and History. He was
gifted with a remarkable memory. lie could retain facts and
reproduce them with flaming vividness and accuracy. He remem-
bered many literary classics, like Paradise Lost by heart, and
for literature ^as the imaginative exploration of the paradoxes of
experience*, he had a warm love. ^‘Macaulay’s passion for
reading, and his marvellous retentive memory are the two chara
cteristics that aflFect his work the most. Both as an historian and
essayist his range of knowledge and faculty of vivid presentiment
are always in evidence.”*

Macaulay comes before his readers in several capacities —
as an .Essayist, as an historian, as a politician, as a lawgiver, and
abpve all as a Victorian flguce. We arc mainly concerned here with
Macaulay as an Essayist and as an Historian.

As an Essayist.

The essays of Macaulay cover a wide field, but they
can broadly be divided into two classes, the literary or critical,
and the historical. Most of the essays of Macaulay were in the
first instance contributed to magaaioes and seemed to have only
six-weeks life. But soon they were lifted out of the ephemeral
pages of current periodicals, and were presented to the reading
public in book form. They have survived to day as the monu-
mental works of his life and w|ll gaily pass on to the next
generation.

The famous literary and ^ critical essijkys of Macaulay are
on Milton, Addison, Goldsmith, Dryden, Leigh Hunt^ Ca oigitwcv

Comptnn Ripkett : A.Hbtory^fli^gliih

( 167 )

Byron, B con, Bunyan, Boswell, Southey and Dr. Johnson. Amon^
the popularly well known historical essays the most vividly
and picturesquely written arc those on Lord (Uive, Warren
Hastings, Chatham, Marlborough, Fredrick the Great, Horace
Walpole, William Pitt, and Sir William Temple. Most of these
essays were written in the prime of life and were published
between 1825 and 1845. He made good use of alt the available
matter on the subject and penned his essays with the object of
providing delight to his readers. Macaulay wrote all his essays,
literary as well as historical, from the historical point of view,
rather than from the stand point of a critic. am nothing’ he
says, if not historical.’ If we take away the historical element
from Macaulay’s essays they lose all their charm. ‘‘Take away
the historical element from them” says Hugh Walker, “and there
is scarcely anything left.” Macaulay loves to evade the task of
literary analysis and treats the subject from the historian’s point
of view instead.

In the essays of Macaulay we need not search for accuracy
of facts. “They are often one-sided and inaccurate” says W. f.
Long. “His opinions” observes Albert, “were often one-sided
and his great parade of knowledge was often flamed with actual
error or distorted by his craving for antithesis and epigram.”
His judgments on Hastings, Marlborough. Boswell and Milton
arc faulty and have not been upheld by later critics. They betray
ignorance of facts and proper evaluation of character. “Evidently
Macaulay had not in the highest degree the power to comprehend
character. In the description of externals he w'as admirable and
to a certain degree he could penetrate motives but he had not
that intuitive insight which give life to the historical hgurcs of
Shakespeare, Scott, and Carlyle.”*

Macaulay’s essays arc wanting in depth and philosophical
reflection. He could not impart any reflective and philosophical
vein to his writings. Gladstone’s observation that Macaulay is
“always conversing or reading or composing, but reflecting never”
is applicable to most of his writings.

Whatever may be the shortcomings of Essays from the
point of view of matter and judgment, it cannot be denied that

* Hugh Walker : TEie Literature of the Victorian Br^

( 168 )

they are extremely pleasant in reading, and owe their popularity
to their immense readability. ^*The difficulty with him is not,
as with same others (the uncongenial Freeman, for example)^ to
take him up, but to put him down : the eye races through those
exciting, easy pages, fearful lest the chapter or the essay come to
an end too soon. And the Essays^ though not up to the standard
Macaulay reached in the History^ reveal this particular quality
at its highest.*

The Essays of Macaulay are indispensable for young people
who are on the threshold of intellectual advancement and are
just starting to take an interest in things of the mind. “How
many people owe their first intellectual stimulus to the Essays.
Arthur Balfour, in his Autobiography^ has expressed the
obligation of those hundreds of people, with minds worth speak-
ing of, for whom the Essays opened a door to higher things.”**

On the technical side, the popularity of the essays is to be
found in the wonderful style in which they have been penned.
More important and delightful than the matter is the pictures-
que, oratorical, conversational, and debating style in which
Macaulay presents his observations in his writings, particularly his
Essays. “The quiet purity of Goldsmith, the severe perfection
of [^andor, the long harmonies of Ruskin are outside the range
of Macaulay” says Hugh Walker, “but all the same he wins us
by bis eloquence, rhetoric, picturesquencss, clarity, vigour, and
mastery of vivid description and racy narration.” The debating
qualities of his essays have been recognised by all critics.
“Macaulay conducts his argument, like a debater rather than like
a philosopher : his style might be called the apotheosis of thes
debating style. His debater’s style, with its sharp contrasts and deft
balances and comparisons, its exaggerations and simplifications
and its rhetorical black and-white surface is for all its obvious
weaknesses, a noble prose style, always full of life and energy,
never languid or merely exhibitionist or self cpnsciously sophi-
sticated. It is a style admirably suited to Macaulay’s temperament
and to the tone and mood and purposes of bis writing.”t

* A. L. Rowse : Macaulay’s Essays.

•• Ibid,

t David Daiches : A Critical History of English Litarataft, Vofumt tl.

( 169 )

Macaulay as an Historian

Macaulay originally planned to write a history of England
from the accession of James U in 1685, to the death of George
IV in 1830 ‘^in a manner so concrete, picturesque, and dramatic
that his narrative of actual events should have the fascination
of romance/* and as he himself desired, should have the “power
to supersede the last fashionable novel upon the dressing table
of young ladies/’ What Macaulay really intended to dn was
not to present a dry-as-dust account of the events of history.
He sought to bring the colour of his lively imagination and the
richness of his majestic style to the narration of historical events
and the portrayal of historical characters. He strove to leave
behind Sir Walter Scott in the creation of vivid history without
much of fiction in it. Even if a little admixture of exaggera-
tion was needed, Macaulay had no objection to that, for in his
viev , “The best portraits are perhaps those in which there is a
slight mixture of caricature, and we are not ccrtiin that the
best histories are not those in which a little on the exaggeration
of fictitious narrative is judiciously employed. Something is lost
in accuracy but much is gained in effect.”

Macaulay could not complete the History according to
his plan. Only five volumes covering a history of sixteen
years were published during l.is life time. “It has been
estimated” says Long, “that to complete the work on the same
scale would require some fifty volumes and the labour of one man
for over a century.”

Macaulay’s aim was to provide a detailed and graphic
picture of the history of the period for which he had a special
liking. Before penning down his thoughts, Macaulay “read
numberless pages, consulted original documents and visited the
seem s which he intended to describe.” Thackeray made the
significant remark which savours of exaggeration that “Macaulay
reads, twenty books to write a sentence and travels one hundred
milcs^ to make a line of description.”

Macaulay’s History is a pageant of pictures, a panorama of
visual history, unfolding the events and portraying the historical
characters with vividness and realism. Macaulay makes his History
as engcossingly captivating and interesting as a novel of Sir Walter

( 170 )

Scott, He gives to his characters the reality of flesh and blood*
His narration is more picturesque than a picture book presenting
scenes of History. He gives a ^^broad and luminous canvas covered
with firmly delineated pictures, which change before out cy«s
into new groupings, and give place to other spectacles as in
a magic.’’

"The merits and defects of Essays are repeated in The
History oj En^Iand^ the former heightened and the latter subdued
by the greater labour bestowed. The style is essentially the same,
but is more chastened. There are the same tricks and mannerisms,
the same brilliant colouring, the same tendency to exaggeration,
the same fondness for antithesis. At first the reader is proba ^ly
swept away by admiration of its rapid facility, its rush and
brilliancy, its fertility of illustration, its strength and effectiveness.
Afterwards he may gradually become conscious of those defects
which are suggested by the adjective "metallic” which Arnold
applies in censure to Macaulay's prose and Mrs. Browning by
way of praise to his verse.”* Lord Houghton calls Macaulay
"a great historical orator and oratorical historian,” and R. E.
J^bb, one of the ablest of hij critics, endorses this view.
Macaulay was nothing if not oratorical and his style is almost
the perfection of rhetorical excellence.

"His energetic and persuasive style, his ad riot manipulation
of illustrative facts, and artful alternation between generalissation
and detail, combine to make him one of the most readable of
extended histories.”**

Macaulay’s History inspite the vividness and pictures-
queness of details is deficient in many ways. Compton-Rickett
pin points the defects of Macaulay’s History. "In the first place,
Macaulay’s imagination is panoramic, not stereoscopic. He can
see with force ai^d clearness the outlines of his pictures ; but he
rarely sees beyond the outline. He sees, but does not see through.
His pages present us with a wonderfully varied and extensive
surface of life. But it is only surface. He has scarcely
anything of Carlyle*s insight into character — that quality which
gives stereoscopic body to The French Revolution**

* Hugh Walker : The Literature of the Victoriao Cia.

** David Daicbes : A Critical History of tngli>h Literature, Volume 1 1,

( 171 )

"In the second place, there is no philosophy, in Macaulay's
outlook.* The world for him is a brilliant pageant; and admittedly
the aspects of peasantry arc worth nothing. But it is something
more than a pageant, it is a play of elemental forces kept in fitful
leash by the hand of civilization and breaking away at times with
dramatic violence. Macaulay saw nothing of this ; or if he did,
it had no interest for him.”

Macaulay had been the victim of prejudices. He had
bias which is not a virtue but a demerit in a historian. He look-
ed at history from a coloured glass. He magnified the virtues of
those heroes whom he liked and condemned others who were not
his liking. "He was apt to see through a magnifying-glass what
was in their favour, and to look throug i the wrong end
of the telescope at whatever milited against them'*
Macaulay eulogised Whig heroes. “His heroes are more
estimable but infinitely more commonplace." They do not impress
us as the heroes of C'.arlyle. "Neither, it must be admitted, was
there anything very attractive in the objects of his admiration.
The English Whigs were a useful class of people, but they were
neither intellectually great nor morally inspiring. They were the
apothesis of the commonplace, and the selection of them as
heroes proves that there was some ioundation for the
charge of Philistinism which was brought against the
historian."**

What is Macaulay's place amon ^ the Historians of the
world ? He is assured of a high place at least among the Historians
of England. If Macaulay is inferior to the greatest historians, he
is inferior to them alone, but among the historians of his country,
he has a place of pride. "He had not the breadth and range of
Gibbon ; he has not the vivid poetic gift of Carlyle or his won-
derful power of penetrating character. He is no rival to
Thucydides in the art of tracing the sequence of cause and
effect in human history, or to Tacitus in the keen and terse
wisdom of his utterances. But he is a consummate master

* "We do not find in Macaulay a profound view of urderlying causes: that
large intellectual interpretation of events which constitute the Philosophy of
history** (Moody-Lovett).

** Hugh Walker : The Literature of the Victotian Era,

( 172 )

of narrative, and in this respect is probibly surpassed only by
Herodotus/’

Q- 40. Write an essay on Cardinal Newman (I80M890)
and the Oxford Movement.

Ans. C.ardinal Newman was one of the greatest Victorian
writers and the greatest figure in the Oxford Movement. He
was at heart a religious man, a man of deep faith and conscience,
and it pained him much to view the forces of industrialism and
scientific advancement making strong dents on the faith of the
religious, minded men and women of the age. Newman, with a
faithful band of followers, strove hard to stem the tide of ad-
vancing materialism and keep away from the fold of Roman
Catholic church th ; vices that had crept into the church of
England. Newman and his followers started, what is known
in Church history as the Oxford Movement, with the deliberate
object of keeping alive the ritualism and faith of Roman
Catholic religion, against the popular views of liberal Christians
like Thomas Arnold, who fastened on the ethical significance
of Christianity and minimised the importance of ritual, of ^Hheo-
logical Articles of opinion” ‘*and all this stuff about the true
Church.” The Oxford Movement stood against too much in-
sistence on reason and proof in religious matters, and sought to
revive the faith, rituals and dogmas of Roman Catholic religion.
It aimed ‘*at the restoration of the poetry, the mystic symbolism,
the spiritual power, and the beauty of the architecture, ritual
and service which had characterised the Catholic Church in the
Middle Ages.”* Just as the Romanticists had infused life into
literature by turning their gasse to the Middle Ages, similarly
the leaders of this movement-Newman, Keble and Pusey, looked
to the past for inspiration, and Newman himself asserted that
his movement had owed much to Scott, who turned men’s minds
in the direction of the Middle Ages.

As the leader of the Oxford Movement Newman repudi-
ated Protestant individualism and bibliolatry, nineteenth-century
liberal Christianity, and the eighteenth century deistical argument

* Moody Lovett : A Historyof E!nltl^^h Literature.

( 173 )

from design. He upheld devotion, faith, rituals, dogmas in
preference to reason and proof, and wrote with vigour in defence
of his view point — “After all man is fwt a reasoning animal, he
is a seeing, feeling, contemplating, acting animal. Tiife is not
long enough for a religion of inferences, we shall never have done
beginning, if we determine to begin with proof."* In fact, the
whole Oxford Movement was a romantic rebellion against the
perfunctory, imaginative routine into which the Church of
England had fallen, and aimed at the revival ot true Roman
Catholic faith in an age of machinery.

The Oxford Movement failed to have any intluence on the
psychological life of the day, and its impact on the growth of
literature was not substantial, ll could win the allegiance of a few
Pre Raphaelite poets and had some efFcct on the Pre-Raphaelite
movement.

Cardinal Newman’s conversion to Roman (Catholicism
became an object of severe criticism and Charles Kingsley charged
him of insincerity and duplicity in changing from Protestantism
to Roman Catholicism, and propagating the Oxford Movement.
To vindicate his position as a Roman Catholic and his conversion
to the Roman Catholic Church, Newman had to come out with
a spirited defence in his famous book Apologia Provita Sua.
The whole book is a vigorous reply to Kingsley’s charge of
wanton dishonesty on the part of Newman in making propaganda
in favour of Roman Catholicism. Newman's standpoint is clear
and comprehensible. He traces the history of his religious
beliefs and comes to the conclusion “that his conversion was only
the final step in a course he had been following since boyhood."
“As a revelation of a soul’s history" says W. J. Long, “and
as a model of pure, simple, unaffected English, this book, entire-
ly apart from its doctrinal teaching, deserves a high place in our
prose literature.” Newman had the better of the argument.
His defence is still read while Kingsley’s attack is forgotten.
Cardinal Newman's other religious works are Via Media Callista
and the Grammar of Assent. They are not of much interest to a
student of literature.

More interesting and valuable than the theological writings

Newman : Apologia Provita Sua.

( 174 )

of Newman is his educational and inspiring book The Idea of
University^ which provides to the modern University leaders the
basic principles concerning the site of the University, the aim of
University education, and the qualifications of the University
teachers. The most significant part of the book is mainly con-
cerned with the propagation of the ideals of liberal knowledge
and intellectual advancement in University circles. The primary
aim of the University in Newman’s view is not to prepare
students for professional courses, but to impart them liberal edu-
cation and make them gentlemen and ladies in life. Newman’s
views are anti-Baconian and he condemns the utilitarian view of
education. He is quite clear in his mind that liberal education,
“which stands on its own pretensions, which is independent of
sequel, expects no compliments, refuses to be informed by any
end."* It can alone bring about the salvation of the intelligensia
of the country.

Cardinal Newman employed a classical way of writing in
the expression of his thoughts. His prose style is characterised
by lucidity, transparency, restraint and balance. Newman's style
is indeed, beautiful style not beautiful with the rhythmic
opulence of Ruskin, nor with the graceful urbanity of Arnold;
nor with the fantastic suggestiveness of De Qutncey; but beautiful
with a limpid lucidity, a chastened eloquence, a gentle
persuasiveness.”**

The diction employed by Newman has strength, elegance
and suppleness. He knows how to make the use of irony in an
effective manner. Fie is also a debater and a polemical writer,
capable of driving a nervous and pressing offensive in a rhetorical
and oratorical style.

'*In the main Newman is a representative of that perfected
plain style which has been more than once indicated as the best
for all purposes in English. It is in him refined still further by
an extra dose of classical and academic correctness, flavoured
with quaint though never over-mannered turns of phrase, and
shot in every direction with a quintessential individuality, rarely
attempting, though never failing when it does attempt, the purely

• Newmn : Idea of a University. ^

Arthur Compton Rickett : A History of English Literature.

( 175 )

rhetorical, but instinct with a strange quiver of religious and
poetical spirit."*

Q. 41. Give your estimate of Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)
as a Critic and as a Prose- Writer.

Ans. Matthew Arnold was not only a great poet but also
a great critic and prose writer of the Victorian age. He was a
critic of literature as well as a critic of the social, economic and
religious life of his times. For Arnold, a critic of literature
was inevitably intertwined with social criticism, for criticism is a
comprehensive term, its object being to focus attention on all
aspects of human life and society. Arnold denned criticism as,
*‘the endeavour, in all branches of knowledge, theology, philosophy
history, art, science to see the object as in itself it really is."
Arnold comes before his readers as a critic of society as well
as a critic of literature, and in both these fields he sheds a new
light and opens new avenues and channels for his followers ‘like
T. S. Eliot, Irving Babbit and Paul Elmer More.

Formative Influences on Matthew Arnold.

In order to understand the full significance of Arnold's
work in criticism it will be necessary to examine the formative
influences on his mind and art as a critic of literature and
society. The greatest influence on Arnold was undoubtedly that
of the classics. He had a great admiration tor Greek thought
and culture, and burnt incense at the altar of Greek masters in
the field of drama, prose, and poetry. He said, “it is time for
us to Hcllenise and to praise knowings for we have Habraised
too much and over valued doing**, Arnold had a great respect
for the ^sanity’ of Greek literature, and sought to introduce the
simplicity, balance, lucidity, method, and precision of Greek
writers in English literature and criticism. «

Next to the Greeks, Arnold was influenced by Goethe,
the German writer of great eminence and fame during the
nineteenth century. He regarded Goethe “as Europe’s sagest
head, and the physician of the Iron Age." His love of self-
culture and discipline of thoughts, was mainly derived from
Goethe. From Goethe, Matthew Arnold learnt the importance

* George Saiotsbury : A Short History of Eoglish Literature.

( 176 )

of n! i 'ctive poetry and great action in poetic compositon.
Goethe had remarked, “Poetry of the highest type manifests
itself as altogether objective, when once it withdravos itself
from the external world to become subjective it begins to dege-
nerate. So long as the poet gives utterance merely to his sub-
jective feelings, he has no right to the title.” These words of
Goethe had a great influence on Matthew Arnold and gave a
twist to his insistence on the objective standpoint in the appre-
ciation of poetry.

Among the French masters of art and criticism Arnold
was mainly influenced by Saintc-Beuye and Senancour. Arnold
had met Sainte-Beuve at Paris in 1859, and ever since that historic
meeting the influence of the French critic became palpable in
his critical writings. “Sainte-Beuve’s influence” . says William
Robbins, “was mainly in the field of literary criticism, a matter
of ‘method,’ to use Arnold’s own world. His tact, his human-
istic standards, the objectivity and curiosity which made of him
a ‘naturalist’ in literary and other criticism, above all the balance
struck with unerring precision these were what Arnold admired
and tried to emulate.”* From Sainte-Beuve Arnold learnt the
lesson of disinterestedness and detachment in judging a work
of art. Arnold’s statement that criticism is, “a disinterested
endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and
thought in the world” is an echo from an essay of Sainte-
Beuve where the French master had spoken of the critic’s task
of .introducing, *Un certain souffle de disintcressetment^^
Sainte-Bcuve’s Portrait Lilterahe is the structural model for
Arnoldian essay in criticism. From Sainte Bcuve Arnold also
picked up the necessity of co-rclating the biographical details
of an artist with his creative work, and judging his creative
production in the light of his biographical facts. Sainte-Beuve
hacl stated, “Literature is not for me distinct or at least
separable from the rest of man and human organisa-
tion; I can taste a work, but it is difficult for me to judge it
independently of my knowledge of the man himself. ” Arnold
accepted this view of the French critic, and his own observa(tions
of Romantic poets in Ess^iys in Criticism 2 LtG governed by this

* WiUiam Robbins : The Ethicil Idealism of Matthew Arnold*

( 177 )

principle of judging an author in the light of his life’s achieve-
ments and endeavours.

Another great Frenchman who left a lasting impression
on Arnold’s critical thought was Senancour, whose Obernamn
considerably influenced his way of life and thought. Arnold
paid him his warm tribute in two long poems Obermam and
Obermann Once More. Arnold was considerably influenced by
Senancour’s profound inwardness, austere sincerity, the delicate
feeling for nature, and the melancholy eloquence of his
writings.

Having examined the formative influences on Arnold’s
critical and literary theories, let us now switch on to an exami-
nation of his critical canons — and his critical observations about
literary productions.

Arnold’s Canons of Criticism.

The first great principle of criticism enunciated by Arnold
is that of disinterestedness or detachment which can be practised by
‘ keeping aloof from what is called the practical view of things.”
Disinterestedness on the part of the critic implies freedom from
all prejudices, personal or historical. A critic should be imper-
sonal, detached and disinterested. He should be above prejudice,
bias and favouratism. He should not favour this ox that
opinion, this or that form of art, but should judge all works
of art and authors from the standard of disinterested objectivity.’
A critic should not be swayed by personal views and opinions
about art, religion, politics, and philosophy. He should keep
his ^aloofness’, for criticism is a ^disinterested endeavour to learn
and propagate the best that is known and thought in
the world.”*

Disinterestedness then is the first great principle of
criticism. The disinterested critic should acquire a store house of
knowledge, and '^equip himself with the knowledge of the best
that has been thought and said in the world.” A critic’s functions
in Arnold's view are threefold "First, there is the critic’s duty to
Learn and understand, he must see things as they really are.
Thus equipped his second task is to hand on his ideas to others,

** Matthdw Arnold : Pjoctioas of Criticism.

( 178 ;

to convert the world to make the best ideas, prevaiL His work
in this respect is that of a missionary. He is also preparing an
atmosphere favourable for the creative genius of the. future-
promoting a current of ideas in the highest degree animating
and nourishing to the creative power.”

Arnold wanted criticism to be lifted from provincialism
and limitation of time and space. The critic was a universal
figure like a creative artist, and he was as good a mouthpiece of
humanity as the literary artist. Criticism should rise above
considerations of time, space, politics, and narrow insular feelings.
It should be cosmopolitan rather than parochial. wish to

decide nothing of my own authority” said Arnold, ‘*the great
art of criticism is to get oneself out of the‘ way and to let humanity
decide.” This provinciality can be avoided by adopting the
comparative method of treatment in critical evaluation of a work
of art. **The critic must know the best that has been thought and
said, both in ancient and in modern times, not only in his own
language, but in the languages from which his native literature
is derived, and in those which are pzoducing literature concurr-
ently. It is thus, by the comparative method, by seeing how
others do, what we also are impelled to attempt that provinciality
is avoided.”

Arnold advocated the comparative' method rather than
historical method for the critic. Criticising the historical method
Arnold says, **The method of historical criticism, is the great •
and famous power in the present day. The advice to study the
character of an author and the circumstances in which he has
lived, in order to account to oneself for his work, is excellent.
But it is a perilous doctrine that from such a study the right
understanding of his work will Spontaneously issue.” Arnold
discarded the grandiose theories of Taine concerning ^race,
milieu, moment,’ and concentrated on the comparative study
of great masters of criticism in all ages and climes.

Coming to actual literary composition, Arnold laid
emphasis on the principle of suitable Action for the drama or poetry.
<*AU depends upon the subject. Choose a fitting action, pene-
trate yourself with the feeling of its situations : this done, every-
thing else will follow.” In this respect Arnold followed

( m •

Aristotle rather than Drydeo, for it was the Greek critic who had
laid • greatpr emphasis on plot or the fable. Like Aristotle,

■ Arnold also believed that the action should command gravity,
seriousness, and sublimity. A work of art wanting in serious
action was not a great work, and it was the duty of an artist
to choose suitable action for his composition.”

Matthew Arnold believed that good action ought to be
presented in a good style, the grand style. He had his own
views about the gr.nd style. He stated that grand style, ‘‘arises
in poetry when a noble nature poetically gifted, treats with
simplicity or severity a serious subject,”

Matthew Arnold allied literature to. society and stated
that, “poetry is a criticism of life under the conditions fixed
for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic
beauty.” Poetry in Arnold’s views had the noble function of
shedding light on the conditions of life and ennoble them by
keeping aloft the higher principles of morality and ethical
life.

The above stated critical principles of Matthew Arnold
have been subjected to a searching examination by Saintsbury
in his History of English Criticism. He has not accepted all the
critical canons of Arnold, and has taken exception to his
remarks on the Grand Style and its application of Milton and
Shakespeare. Arnold’s insistence that poetry is a criticism of
life has been considered a commonplace remark because, *‘all
literature is the application of ideas to life ; and to say that
poetry is the application of ideas to life, under the conditions
fixed for poetry, is simply a vain repetition.” *

^ atthew Arnold’s chief critical works.

Arnold’s main critical works arc on The Preface To The
Ptms of 1853, On Translating Homer, The Study of Celtic
L iterature, and Essays in Criticism, Wc will discuss the contents
and value of each of them one by one.

IIk Preface. ^

Arnold made his first appearance as a critic in the Preface
to the poems of 1853. It was in this preface that ArnnIH uia

* George Saintsbury: A History of ^glish Ciidcisoi,

( 180 )

stress on the importance of the subject — *^the great action*’ |
and the study of the ancients. He also elaborated |iis view of
the grand style and its proper handling by the creative
artist. ;

On Translating Homer 1861.

In this work Arnold, **applies himself to the appreciation of
actual literature, and to the giving of reasons for his appreciation,
in a way new, delightful and invaluable.”* He defines criticism
as, “The endeavour, in all branches of knowledge, theology,
philosophy, history, art, science to sec the object as in itself it
really is.” The definition of criticism, outlined in this work
forms the basis of Arnold’s later work and gives a pip to his com-
prehensive view of criticism. Arnold also presents his views about
the grand style in a more emphatic way than he had done earlier
in the Preface. He says, “The grand style arises in poetry when
a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or severity
a serious subject.” The grand style in Arnold’s view is appli-
cable only to Homer, Dante, and Milton, and cannot be applied
to Shakespeare, Spenser or Shelley. Saintsbury does not agree
with Arnold’s limitation of the grand style to a few limited poets,
and says, “For my part, I will not loose the fragile boat or incur
the danger of the roof — speaking in Pickwickian Horatian
manner-with any one who denies the grand style to Donne or to
Dryden to Spenser or to Shelley. The grand is the transcendent
and it is blasphemy against the spirit of poetry to limit the fash-
ions and the conditions of transcendency.”**

The Study of Celtic Literature.

In this book Arnold makes a study of Celtic literature.
He finds in this literature, the dominant characteristics of
‘melancholy’, ‘natural magic’, and 'vagueness’, and he comes to
the conclusion that the presence of these qualities in the poetry
of the Romantic poets is due to the influence of Celtic literature
on them. Arnold’s assumptions are not based on facts, for
neither Shakespeare nor Keats had the faintest evidence of Celtic
blood or Celtic influence. Saintsbury takes Arnold to task for

• George Sainisburjr : a History of English Criticism.

*• ibid

( 181 )

pfFcring remarks which cannot be proved by actual facts. His
criticism of this book is worth quoting, ‘‘where melancholy, and
natural magic aid the do strongly and especially, if not

exclusively, appear in Celtic poetry, I do not deny, because I do
not know ; that Mr. Arnold’s evidence is not sufficient to esta-
blish their special if not exclusive prevalence, I deny, because 1
do ^ know. That there is melancholy, natural magic, the vague in
Shakespeare and Keats, I admit, because I know ; that Mr. Arnold
has any valid argument showing that their presence is due to
Celtic influence, I do not admit, because I know that he has
produced none. With bricks of ignorance and mortar of assump-
tion you can build no critical house.”

7 he Essays in Criticism

The two volumes of Essays in Criticism (1865-1888) have
an important place in Arnold’s prose works. The first and second
scries of essays are, in outlook, all of a piece ; they are contrasted
only in subject. In the first series Arnold deals with minor authors
like Juliet, Maurice and his sister Eugenie de Guerin, or remote
authors like Spinoza, Marcus Arclius and Heine. “The list of
names looks like an appeal to intellectual snobbery, and so it is
these ate not authors any English Critic bad tackled before, and
they are offered to us now as a cure for intellectual isolationism.
With Arnold, indeed, snobbery enters English criticism with a
vengeance, and it has never been quite eradicated since.”^ In the
second and third series he deals with The Study of Poetry^
Wordsworth^ Byron, Thomas Gray, Keats, Milton, and Emerson,
Arnold’s observations on Wordsworth, Keats, Emerson and
Byron have met with general approval, but his denunciation of
Shelley as ‘an ineffectual angel’ has not been accepted by any
critic; for the angel is very effectual and provides a tougher
criticism of life than Arnold’s rejection of life. But all the same
the. essays in criticism are remarkable intellectual feats, and not
tQ h^ive read them, is not to be in the swim of active intellectual
life, of thCfday, “No body after reading Essays in Criticism, has
anyjexcuse for .not being a critic”* Arnold’s' £’ 550^5 in Criticism

* George Watson ; The Literary Critics.

•• Heibert Pau/ iMatthew Arnold.

( ll-Z )

was a landmark in the history of English criticism and prdse
writing. The book created a stir in the literary world by virtue
of its style, the novelty and confidence gf its opinions and the
wide and curious range of its subjects. It silenced the heresies
of popular critics of the day and pierced through the armoufy
of self-sufficiency and provinciality in criticism.

Arnold’s Social Political and I heological Criticism. •

Among the works dealing with social, political and theolo-
gical criticism, the pride of place has to be given to Culture and
Anarchy (1869). It is a work of supreme importance for the.
social chronicler of the age. Here Arnold attacks the Barbarians
and Philistines of the age for their growing craze for materialism
and their disregard for religious and spiritual values. They
neither have sweetness nor light which constitute real culture.
Arnold pleads for the propagation of culture and intellectual
prefection for the attainment of an ideal society.

Among the books dealing with political criticism arc
England the Italian Question (1859), Mixed Essays (1879), Irish
Essays (1882) and Discoveries in America (1885),

Among the theological works of Matthew Arnold, special
emphasis has to be given to St, Paul and Protestantism (1870),
Literature and Dogma (1873), God and the Bible (1875), and
Last Essays on Church and ReligionilSll), On these religious
works we notice Arnold as a critic of religious dogmas and
stereotyped theology. He is severely opposed to the dogmatic
elements in religion and is a bitter critic of creeds and
blind beliefs in religious matters. His Literature and
Dogma is a masterpiece in this direction, and rudely shakes the
mistaken religions of his contemporaries. The value of Arnold’s
religious criticism lies in the fact that “they face the question of
possible disappearance of all existing forms of faith, and the
rejection of what is called ‘supcrnaturalism;* and they indicate the
belief of the writer that even if theology were swept into the
rubbish-heap of forgotten literature, and miracles were universally
rejected, what is life-giving and sustaining in religion would
still remain,”*

Hush Walker : The Uteratuare of the Vietoriaa Era.

( 1H3 )

Arnold^ limitat*<'ns and merits as a critic.

The study of Arnold’s canons of criticism and his maia
critical works brings out his limitations as well as merits as a
critic. Directing first our attention to his limits tions» we are
reminded of Garrod’s remark that Matthew Arnold ‘was a man of
letters who became a literary critic by accident.’ *'He was prima*
fily interested in educatioral. religious and theological subjects,
and criticism of literature was a passing phase of his life. 1 am
not sure that it was in his heart to be a literary critic at all.
Nor for the most part was Matthew Arnold’s public interested
in him as a literary critic.*^ He gave a wider connotation to
criticism and subtnerged literary criticism into the general
criticism of society.

Arnold was not a scientific critic. He was more of a
moralist and judged every work of art from the moralistic view
point. For him a poetry of revolt against moral ideas was a
poetry of revolt against life. Modern taste is not in favour of
Arnold’s moral obsession in critical matters.

Arnold sometimes offered criticism without adequate
knowledge on the subject. He built his critical house on the
brick of ignorance, and wanted to support it by the mortar of
assumption. Prof. Saintsbury has severely taken him to task for
his ignorance of Celtic literature in rhe Study of Celtic Literature.
He deplores his lamentable ignorance, and considers Arnold
unlearned as c«>mpared to Johnson, Coleridge.

Arnold failed to practise the principle of disinterestedness
in his criticism of English poets. He made a lot of fuss about
disinterestedness, but was swayed by personal prejudices, when
he came to criticise Chaucer and Shelley. He was dogmatic
in his approach particularly in dealing with the Romantics.
‘‘Arnold’s critical programme of ‘a disinterested endeavour’ to
seek out and advocate the best is not only hopelessly question-
: it is also hopelessly out of key with Arnold’s
own achievements. The Essays in Criticism and the
Biblical reinterpretations axe not even remotely disinterested.
They are works of passionate partisanship by a skilful, urbane,
not al ways candid controversialist with a ssest for opposition .
* ‘ h. W CmbimKietryaDd CritiSsin of tif"

( l«« )

Theii virtues which arc considerable, arc essentially polcmicaL
If Arnold bad seriously tried to be ^disinterested’ his career as
a critic would not have happened at all.”* His cult of class!*
cism, dr as Saintsbury calls it neo-tato-classicism marred much
of his critical writings.

His method of hammering a point was sometimes nausea-
ting. The way in which he ‘sells poetry by the pound’ in his
essay on The Study of Poetry is not much appreciated in our
citnes.

Arnold’s dislike of the historical method of criticism is
not upheld to-day. Outside the nineteenth century, the time
factor did not exitit for him. His insistence on the comparative
method of criticism in preference to the historical method has
not been upheld in modern criticism. “// shows how untypical a
Victdrian critic he was.”**

Arnold was guilty of tautology and repetition, incoher-
ence and vacuous statements in his critical observations. Here
is a passage from The Study of Poetry bringing out the defects
of his critical approach pointed above.

“In poetry, as a criticism of life under the conditions
fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic
beauty, the spirit of our race will find its consolation and stay;
But the consolation and stay will be of power in proportion to
the power of the criticism of life. And the criticism of life will be
of power in proportion as the poetry conveying it is excellent
than inferior, sowtd rather than unsound or half sound, true
rather than untrue or half true""

> Does this really mean more than that all things considered,
good poems arc better than bad poems. Arnold’s egoism as
a critic stands in the way of his excellence as a critic. He obtrudes
his personality in his critical observations and departs from his
standard of disinterested objectivity. “His way of writing com-
pels attention, but that attention is directed, not on his object, but
oh himself and his object together. In the essay on he

stands like an unyielding rock washed round by the waves of
Amiei. His essays arc monologues. We cannot imagine him

George Watioa : Tie Literary Critics.

• bid.

( 185 )

employing, as Dtyden did, the dialogue form. Arnold’s egotism
accounts for the high-pitched conv^ersational tone, the ripple of
inspired extemporisation. It all makes away from criticism
because you cannot show off and be disinterested at the same
time.”*

Matthew Arnold has also been charged with snobbery
and false display of learning. ‘‘With Arnold indeed, snobbery
enters English criticism with a vengeance and it has never been
quite eradicated since.”**

“There seems no good reason now for accepting Arnold's
claims to greatness as a critic. Those who see in Arnold’s essay
evidence of a major critical intelligence should set themselves to
consider, the following objections. Where first in the entire Corpus
of Arnold’s criticism, do we see the ‘great critical effort’ at
work upon any English text — upon a single play of Shakespeare
or poem of Milton, Wordsworth or Keats ?”***

In the foregoing pages wc have pin-pointed the short-
comings and defects of Mathew Arnold’s criticism. The defects
need not detract from his merits as a critic. He was indeed a
colossus in the history of English criticism. Before Arnold
English criticism was in a state of chaos. It was Arnold who
gave coherence and system, and taught people how to criticise
books and authors. “Criticism in England might be said to
have started and ended with Matthew Arnold; before him there
was a chaos after him a multitudinous sea.”f

What were the positive services rendered by Matthew Arnold
to English Criticism. Saintsbury, the severe critic of Arnold, has to
recognise the merits and services of Arnold as a critic in the
following lines taken from his A History of English Criticism.

“His services, therefore, to English Criticism, whether
as a ‘preceptist’ as or an actual craftsman cannot possibly be
overestimated. In the first respect, he was, if not the absolute

* TillotBon : Criticism and tbe Nineteenth Century.

** Georne Watson ; Tbe Literary Critics.

••• Ibid.

t Philip M. Jones : IntroJuctioa to Twaodetb Century Critical Bssays

(World elastics).

( 186 )

reformer, the leader in reform, of the slovenly and disorganised
condition into which Romantic criticism had fallen. In the
second, the things which he had not, as well as those which he
had, combined to give him a place among the very first. He had
not the sublime and ever new inspired inconsistency of Drydcn.
Dryden, in Mr. Arnold’s place, might have begun by cursing
Shelley a little, but would have ended by blessing him all but
w^holly. He had not the robustness of Johnson, the supreme
critical ‘reason’ of Coleridge; scarcely the exquisite, if fitful, appre-
ciation of Lamb, or the full-blooded and passionate appreciation
of Hazlitt. But he had an exacter knowledge than Dryden’s; the
fineness of his judgment shows finer beside Johnson’s bluntness,
he could not wool-gather like Coleridge; his range was far wider
than Lamb’s; his scholarship and his delicacy alike gave him an
advantage over Hazlitt. Systematic without being hidebound,
well read (if not exactly learned) without pedantry; delicate
and subtle w ithout weakness or dilettantism; Catholic without
eclectism; enthusiastic without indiscriminateness,— Mr. Arnold
is one of the best and most precious of teachers on his own side.
And when at those moments which are, but should not be, rare,
the Goddess of Criticism descends Like Cambwa and her lion team
into the lists, and with her Nepen the makes man forget sides
and sects in common love of literature, then he is one of the
best and most precious of critics.”

“No English or American critic since Coleridge has had
a more extensive influence than Mr. Arnold. For his influence
has operated in at least three ways. He was, in one sense,
something of a spokesman for nineteenth-century poetic taste.
Secondly, through Arnold, more cosmopolitan ideas became
readily accessible to English speaking critics and readers. After
becoming current, tbcse*bavc passed unobtrusively into much of
the criticism of the past forty years, including that which no^
Icoks on Arnold himself is cither academically ineffectual or else
as an evil spirit rcprescniirg, “romantic tastes” in style. Lastly
much of the modern defence of the central educational v^iivo of
literature xests^where the defence is impressive— oo classical

( 187 )

premises resurrected and popularized, however vaguely and
sketchily by Arnold.”*

Arnold^s Prose Style.

Matthew Arnold’s prose style was considerably influenced
by the example of French masters of prose like Sainte-Beuve and
Renan, and it was his endeavour to introduce the same method,
precision, proportion and arrangement in his prose writings as
was found in the works of the French writers. Arnold succeeded
in his mission, and his prose style is characterised by all those
qualities dear to a classical writer of English prose. Arnold
was considerably influenced by the example of Addison and
Steele, and it was his effort to make English prose free from the
vices of the provincial, Corinthian, and the Asiatic styles of
Newman, Macaulay, and Kingslakc.

Arnold’s prose is mainly characterised by lucidity and-
clarity. He is clear and precise in his expression. His prose is
transparent and crystal clear like a limpid stream. Suavity and
serenity arc the other hallmarks of his style. He is never loud
or violent, and rarely allows himself to be swept away by the
gush of powerful rhetoric.

Arnold’s prose bears the stamp of his poetic afflatus, and
his sentences are coloured by his poetic feelings, “It would
do wrong" says Oliver Elton **to Matthew Arnold to sever his
prose which is often that of a poet, from his verse into which
the thought and temper of his prose continually find their way."
His criticism of Shelley as “a beautiful and ineffectual angel
beating his luminous wings in the void in vain” exhibits his
poetic way of exposing Shelley’s idealism. But generally speaking
we do not come across a super abundance of polyphonic
words in his prose writings, and he has no special flair
for rhythmic and musical words like Pater and Symons;
His is not beaded style whose thoughts are lost in its garnit-
ure’. It has glitter and gusto, but not ^n exuberance of these
qualities. Arnold’s symmetry and proportion have a greater appeal
to us than his poetic touches. His sentence construction is based
on the Greek and Latin principles of balance, and proportion,

* Walter Jacktm Baie« : Matthew Amjid. (Fr^m Criticism : The Major Texts).

( 188 )

harmony, precision and symmetry.

“Arnold was a propagandist for culture, and in his propa-
gandist books and essays he developed a style admirably suited
to his purposes. He projects his own temper of sweet reason-
ableness by a variety of artful devices, and at the same time, by
his ingenious use of pet terms and phrases deliberately repeated
in different contexts, he can express irony, contempt, impatience
or schoolmasterly reproval. He is brilliant in his handling of
personalities, succeedin in giving a tone of hectoring unreason to
his opponents by the way he quotes them and the use he makes of
his quotations. He can make his opponents appear ridiculous by
gently but firmly repeating and repeating their remarks in a per-
fectly controlled context of ever-growing irony, until in the end
even the courtesy with which he invariably treats them becomes
a device for destroying them. He can build up the mood until
even his thoroughly polite mentioning of the proper name of an
opponent makes the man appear silly. He has nothing of
Carlyle’s prophetic violence or Ruskin’s poetic eloquence; his
quieter rhetoric has spoken more cogently to later generations.”*

Arnold’s prose style is sometimes boring particularly when
he repeats his point, in different forms, and obtrudes his persona-
lity in an egotistical manner. Rightly Herbert Paul points out
that “it would have been well if Arnold had applied the critical
prunning knife to the exuberant mannerisms which sometimes
disfigure his style.*'

Q. 42. Give your estimate of Walter Horatio Pater (1839-
1894) as a critic and prose writer of the Victorian Age.

Ans. Walter Pater was one of the greatest critics and prose
writers of the Victorian Age. He was at heart a lover of art,
beauty, and melody, and belonged to the aesthetic movement
sponsored and spearheaded by the Pre-Raphaelite poets. Art for
Art’s sake was Walter Pater’s ideal, and all his prose works and
works of criticism are saturated with the spirit of aestheticism.
He carried forward the style and message of Flaubert, the French

• David Daiches : A Critical History of Esgitsh Literature, Uoluniell
•* HArhert Paul : Matthew Arnold.

( 189 )

critic and artist, tn literary and critical works and laid
emphasis on the glorification of art for its own sake He brought
the subjective and the imptessionistic method into full play in his
works, and gave an artistic touch to every thought he expressed
in his poetic style.

Pater’s Works

Walter Pater began his literary career by contributing an
essay on Coleridge to a magazine in 1856. His approach to
('oleridge was much appreciated and the author was inspired by
public acclamation to produce works of art and criticism.
Pater’s first volume was Studies in the History of the Rc/utissance
(1873). In approaching the Renaissance Pater did not set out to
do the works of the excavator or the professional critic. He did
not present the whole story of the Renaissance but concentrated
his attention on the evaluation of the works of artists like
J.eonardo de Vinci, Sandro Batticelli and Du-Bellay. He meditated
with conscious artfulness over Renaissance art and life in an
endeavour to illustrate and implement his view that, **\n aesthetic
criticism the first step towards seeing one’s objects as it really

is, is to know one’s own impressions as it really is, to discriminate

it, to realise it distinctly,”

In 1885, Arnold produced a long novel Marius the Epi-
curean, The story of this novel is set in the second century A.D. in
the age of the Anton incs. Marius, a young Roman lad is first
brought up in the old Roman religion as it lingered on in country
places, and then later on he embraces the new Christianity, and
cultivates a few Christian friendships. He sacrifices his life for
the sake of a Christian friend and presents an ideal ot heroic self
sacrifice. Through Marius, Pater seeks to “s[)iritualise the
search for pleasure as far as sacrifice pure and simple.”

«Slowly moving, interlarded with philosophic meditations
and discussions, with Latin and Greek phrases woven at intervals
into the elaborate English prose, inset Socratic dialogues,
carefully wrought reconstructions of places and atmospheres, a
retelling of the story of Cupid and Psyche, and continual echoes
of late Roman lyric poetry, and of both pagan and early
Christian liturgical literature, the book almost sinks under, its
own weight. If read as a novel it would indeed sink, but it

( 190 )

remains afloat as an extended exploration of the relation
between art, religion, philosophy and experience and how this
relation can affect the sensibility.”*

I maginary 'Portraits (1887).

In Imaginary Protraits Pater introduces four characters
drawn from different countries and climes. A Prince of
Court Painters is the story of Antony Watteau, the famous
French painter; Sebestian Van Storck is the picture of
young Hollander, Duke Carl of Rosemnold is a young German
nobleman; Apollo in Picardy reveals a new aspect of Pater’s
character. To these portraits arc added two stories Emerald
Uthwart and The Child in the House. They are marked with a
wistful charm, and haunting melody.

In 1889 Pater produced his masterpiece Appreciations,
a volume containing his views about Charles Lamb, Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Sir Thomas Browne, and D. G. Rossetti, with the
opening essay on Style wherein Pater expounds his views on
style and the search for the exact and precise word in the express-
ion of the ‘sense of fact' after the example and practice of Flaubert,
the French artist. His criticism is generally discursive, inter-
spersed with biographical and general comments and with philo-
sophical observations as when he breaks into his discussion of
Coleridge to defend “the relative spirit” against the tendency “to
tuirn the relative spirit, by its constant dwelling on the more
fugitive conditions or circumstances of things, breaking through
a thousand rough and brutal classifications, and giving elasticity
to inflexible principles.”

Pater’s interest in classical studies was well reflected in
Plato and Platonism (1889) and Greek Studies (1895). His last
work is Goston de Labour. It is an unfinished romance concerning
his own life.

In all these literary and critical works the stamp of Pater’s
personality can be palpably felt by the reader* “The mirror which
Pater holds upto nature is one which can reflect only himself.
There is nothing in the last degree objective in his work; it is

* David Daiches : A Critical History of Hogiish Literature, Volunof 11.

( 191 )

nardly too, much to say that the whole of it, whether intentionally
or not is autobiographic

Walter Pater as a Critic.

Walter Pater was an important English critic of the
last generation of the nineteenth century, and he stood to the
generation in a relation resembling those of Coleridge to the
first and Arnold to the latter part of the second, lie did not belong
to the category of formal and professional critics and whatever
literary criticism flowed from his pen was more in the nature of
subjective appreciation of a literary work than a judgment on it
from an objective standpoint. Aldington is very much to the
point when he states in the introduction to the selected works of
Walter Pater that, “fundamentally Pater was neither Prose-Poet
nor critic, but something in between the two, with the critic or
at any rate the man of letters predominating.”

As a critic, it was Pater’s object to bring about the
fusion of classical and romantic qualities and cultivate the
virtues of both in a manner harmonious, without betraying any
discordance in their union. He was gifted with a penetrating
insight and he could discover the romantic qualities and aspects
ot classical life and arc, and the classical elements in romantic
periods. He had a particular liking for the Renaissance period
because it presented a meeting-point of the classical and the
romantic spirit. For Pater romanticism centred in ‘curiosity
and a love of beauty’, and classicism in a ‘comely order.’ It
was Pater's job as a critic to harmonise these two currents,
and this he admirably does in his essay on Romantic and Classic
elements in literature. “The true functio.i of Pater is to
make the romantic ones more classical, to superimpose the
comely order upon beauty^ and in doing so inevitably to reduce
the strangeness. This he does almost inspite of himself, and
yet with the approval of his own judgment.”**

Asa critic. Pater adopted the subjective or the impressi-
onistic method, which wjas poles apart from Matthew Arnold's
disinterested pursuit of literature and objective standpoint in
approaching a work of art.^ Paier’s 'Appreciations are primarily

Hugh Walker : The Literature of the Victoriao Era.

•• IbW.

( 192 )

fiom the subjective standpoint and he rccuius ms uwii luiprc-
ssions of their work. ‘‘Pater's critical writing then must be regarded
mainly as a scries of impressions; and if we were to call it impre-
ssionist criticism the suggested parallel with impressionist
painting would not be wholly inapt. In both there is the
formal allegiance to science, but behind it an essentially
lyric; mood the same neglect of structure and definition in
pursuit of delicate evanescent effects that are felt to be
more leil and more important became more immediate."*
Pater is at his best in judging poets and artists who shared his own
introspective aesthetic and brooding nature. Browne and
Coleridge are given a fair treatment for they were to his liking.

If Pater had chosen to write on Keats he would have
produced a nice critical essay on Keats^ the romantic lover
of beauty and art belonged to his own class and school. Pater
would not have succeeded in his criticism of a genius of
the free and objective type like Shakespeare. At best Pater
is a subjective artist and critic and his method is that of
impressionism which Lamb and Hasslitt had brilliantly illuminated.

Pater's interest as a critic was not limited merely to the
evaluation of authors, but also to their styles. He was as critical
ot thought as the style in which the thought was couched. He
was sensitive to the colour and gradation of shade in words, and,
“there is an amazing delicacy and subtlety in the critical nuances
by which he endeavoured to actualist for the reader the object of
bis criticism. Only one has to read the Essays on Lamb and
Rossetti to appreciate."** Pater’s advice to literary artists as
regards the use of proper style was, “say what you have to say,
what you have a will to say, in the simplest, the most direct and
exact manner possible, with no surplus age — there is the justifica-
tion of the sentence so fortunately born, ‘entire, smooth and
round’, that it needs no punctuation, and also (that is the point)
of the most elaborate period if it be light in its elaboration."f

As a critic of Art , Pater placed music on a much higher
pedastal than other fine acts. In one of his essays he pleads

* Qraham Hough : The Last Romastics,

* ' Ooropton^Rickett : A History of English Literature,
t Pater's Essay on Style*

( 193 )

fcfvcotly £oc music for here is a fusion of sound and sense, and
tor him architecture and sculpture ate but harmonies and rhythm
in stone— music stately expressed. For Pater the ideal is com-
plete union of form and content,'' and this is best achieved in
music. That is the reason why he holds music in high esteem
and regards it as the finest of the fine arts. In this respect Pater's
own words arc characteristic — *‘If music be the ideal of all art
whatever, precisely because in music i is impossible to distinguish
the form from the substance or matter, the subject from the
expression, then literature, by finding its specific excellence in
the absolute correspondence of the term to its import, will be
but ii Ifilling the condition of all artistic quality in things every-
where of all good art.”

Pater makes a difference between good art and great art
in bis essay on style. Good art is not necessarily great art, for
gicat art must also have something impressive in “the quality of
the matter it informs or controls.” It is on this, on “its
cempass, its variety, its alliance to great ends, or the depth of
the note of revolt, or the largeness of hope in it, that the
greatness of the literary art depends,”

Pater's criticism suffers from certain drawbacks. His
egoism and subjectivism sometime become nauseating. He lacks
a definite four-square originality, and fresh air. “The want of
fresh air is the great deficiency in Waiter Pater, and a source of
the discomfort which he causes to most readers unless they are
like himself,”*

Inspite of the few defects in Pater’s criticism, “he is our
greatest critic since Coleridge. He left behind him a little
creative writing, and sheaf of what he called Appreciations.
Time has little dulled or worn that fabric; it is dyed too fast.
What Pater may have lost by his esoteric and not wholly healthy
habit of mind, and his indifference to the broad energies of
mankind, he more than recovers by his delicacy of sense and his
unimpeded concentration. His influence stole out from a narrow
circle. It has never reached the larger public, but it has never
retreated.”**

• Oliver EUon : A Survey of Eoglish Literature.

Ibid.

( 194 )

Pater’s Prose Style.

Pater's views on Style are embodied in his essay On Style
the opening essay in his book Appreciations. Pater laid emphasis
on colour, music, and harmony in the expression of thought.
He advocated a consciously artistic prose where all superfluities
should be eliminated and where the words should be chosen with
jealous and loving care, so as to express clearly and precisely the
underlying thoughts.

True to what he championed. Pater cultivated a prose
style full of colour and melody, marked with ornateness and
exquisite polish. ‘^His prose is a skilful music, nervous like that
of recent composers, blending the more distant elements of
nature and the soul into a harmony,”

In Pater's prose we hear echoes of Charles Lamb, De
Quincey, Newman, and Ruskin. He was akin to Charles Lamb in
the delicacy of touch and the subtle flavour of language. He had
a certain nearness to De Quincey in the impassioned
autobiographical tendency and a fondness for retrospect and
speculative fancy. He was very much in the line of Newman in
respect of the restraint, the economy of effect, and the perfect
suavity of his work. We have in Pater the suggestiveness of
Ruskin, though he often parted company with the great
Victorian artist and turned aside in the direction of repression
rather than volubility, of severity rather than prodigality.

“The essence of his attempt was to produce prose that
has never before been contemplated in English, full of colour
and melody, serious, exquisite, ornate. He devoted equal pains
both to construction and ornamentation. His object was that
every sentence should be weighed, charged with music, haunted
with echoes; that it should charm and suggest rather than
convince or state. The triumph of his art is to be metrical
without metre, rhythmical without monotony. There will, of
course, always be those whom this honeyed, laboured cadence will
affect painfully with a sense of something stifling and over-
perfumed. But to such as can apprehend, feel enjoy, there is the
pleasure of perfected art of language, of calculated effect, of
realisation with a supreme felicity of the intention of the writer.”^

A, C. Btnion : Walter Pater.

( 195 )

What is after all the effect of all this highly wrought prose
of Walter Pater ? The impression it leaves upon us is one of
decadence. His prose is not for daily use, *‘The high wrought
English of Pater is indeed beautiful, but the beauty is artificial
and the sense it leaves is not a sense of happiness/'*

^^It is the fashion now to look down on Pater and to
abominate his prose; but his interpretation of his criticism has
illuminating moments, and if his prose is languorous, it is with the
languor of an athlete at rest. He is the conscious prose-artist
of the period; he had a good ear, and a respect for words, and
though he is not a model to be followed, there is much to be
learnt from him.'* In his prose works we hear echoes of
"^inexhaustible discontent, languor, and homesickness, the chords
of which ring all through our modern literature."

Q. 43, In what ways does Walter Pater stand distinguished
from Matthew Arnold as a critic of art, literature and society ?

Ans. Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater were the great
critics of the later nineteenth century. They were stawlwarts of
criticism, but differed in their aims and objectives as critics of
art, literature and society.

Matthew Arnold took a comprehensive view of criticism,
and included in it not only the criticism of literature and
art, but also the criticism of society. In his opinion criticism is
an endeavour, in all branches of knowledge — theology, philosophy,
history, art, science to see the object as in itself it really is. He
advocated ‘disinterested objectivity’ in approaching a work of art
and literature. He favoured detachment and aloofness on the
part of the critic. It was the duty of the critic to examine works
of art from an objective standpoint without bringing in the
critic’s own personality in the judgment. This is what should
mean by disinterested pursuit on the part of the critic.

Walter Pater upheld a narrow view of criticism. He con-
fined criticism to art and literature, rather than to all other vital
concerns of society. His view of criticism is limited in its

* Hugh Walker : The English Essay and Essayists.

( 1^6 )

scope. Further Patvsr upheld the ^subjective approach to a work
of art and literature. In his opinion criticism of literature and
art was a matter of impressionism and analysis. It was the
critic’s job to examine the work of an artist from the subjective
standpoint. The critic was required to record one's sense of
fact as distinguished from mere fact itself.

The difference between Arnold’s and Pater's theories,
therefore, is very clear and evident. Whereas Pater believed in
subjective interpretation of a work of art, Matthew Arnold
considered this subjective interpretation as suicidal and fatal to
‘the dispassionate consideration of a work of art’. He was
against all caprice, waywardness, and whimsicality on the part
of the critic. He was above individuality and provinciality and
maintained cosmopolitanism in critical evaluations. To him
the personal clement was of little justification in any critical
estimate’. He said, *nhe great art of criticism is to get oneself
out of the way and let humanity decide” Walter Pater had no
sympathy with such an objective standpoint in criticism, and his
Appreciations completely disapprove of Arnold’s insistence on
objectivity and disinterested approach to a poet or an artist.
To Pater individual impressions count a lot in judging a work of
art. He directs our attention to the way a critic should judge'a
piece of.art : ‘‘What is this song or picture, this engaging persona-
lity presented in life or book to me ? What effect does it really
produce on me ? Does it give me pleasure ? And if so, what sort
or degree of pleasure ? All this means that a piece of art should
be judged subjectively.” **To Arnold the object lay in the
external world sharply clear to for anybody, who had not blinded
himself with insular or provincial zeal, for Pater it had no exis-
tence save among the thoughts it had stimulated.” For Pater
the necessary preliminary is to know one’s own impression as it
really, is, rather than worry about the object as in itself it
really is.

Arnold discarded the historical method of approaching a
work of art. He ignored the importance and validity of the age
and the time in which the poet lived. To him historical appro-
ach was futile, for a work of art was to be judged not by the
standards of the time in which it was produced, but from the

( 197 )

standards which had been laid down by the great master in all
ages and climes. Arnold attached no importance to personal or
historical background.

Pater^ in this respect, stands contrasted with Matthew
Arnold. He laid emphasis on the historical aspect of criticism
and was well aware of the significance of the broader historical
perspective. He took into account the age and the circumstances
in which a work of art was produced.

Matthew Arnold upheld the moralistic approach to
poetry and art. He considered that a poetry of revolt against
moral ideas was a poetry of revolt against life, and a poetry of
thoughtful considerations and good moral action was something
to be prised in life, Walter Pater disapproved of the moralistic
stand in judging poets and artists, and laid stress on the aesthetic
way of judging an author.

Arnold’s judgments are dogmatic and expressed in a style
that is precise and exact. His critical style is based on the
great ideal of balance and sanity. It lacks artistic beauty and
exhilaration of spirit. Pater’s style of criticism is artistic, melodic
and picturesque. His manner is poetic, and he sways us by his
artistic style.

On the whole Arnold’s position as a critic is sounder than
Pater’s. ‘^Pater’s remarks are for the most part capricious,
always highly personal and therefore, unacceptable to a great
majority of scholars. They are very often unprincipled, and
lack solidity and definiteness. He is less weighty, less sound, less
principled, and less authoritative than A old.” He represents
more than Coleridge *^that inexhaustible discontent, languor, and

homesickness the chords of which ring all through our

modern literature.”

, Q. 44 What is the significance of the work of John
Addlngion Symonds and Osc$>r Wilde in the aesthetic movement
of the Victorian Age ?

^na. John Addington Symonds (1840-1893).

Symonds is an important member of the decadent scbpol.
He is known by his The Renaissance Of Italy and Shakespeare's

( 198 )

Predecessors in the English Drama. He is inferior to Pater both
as a critic and as a stylist. His style is florid and flowery and is
marred by verbose prolixity. "As a stylist he is attractive and
pictureque, but overornate, and his diffuseness and lack of method
compare unfavourably with Pater’s concentrative lucidity.”*

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900).

Wilde upheld the theory of ^Art for Art’s sake,’ and carried
forward the aesthetic movement to its culminating point, throwing
morality out of view altogether. For Wilde, Art had no other
aim save to gratify the taste of the artist. It had no bearing on
social problems. It had no relation with morality. "The basis of
Ruskin’s aestheticism is ethical; Wilde adopted the aestheticism,
but eliminated the moral.”** The artist lived in a world of his
own creating pictures of beauty and love for his own delight.

Wilde tried his hand at several kinds of writing characterised
by wit and display of cleverness. He wrote poems having no
originality about them. In his verses, graceful, scholarly, melodious,
we find an imitative artist, who successfully catches echoes of Hood,
Tennyson, Arnold, Rossetti, Swinburne, without sounding any note
of his own. "The bulk of his verse is over-wrought” says Hugh Wal-
ker, "and we tire of it, and long for something less sophisticated.”

Wilde wrote a number of comedies in the manner of the
artificial comedy of manners of the Restoration Age. Lady
Windermere'^ Fan (1893) is a miracle of wit ; A Woman of no
Importance 2 ind The Importance of being Earnest (1899) are monu-
ments of almost cxhaustlcss ingenuity and resource. "Thev are
trivial comedies for serious people.” In Salomcy the cruelty of
sensual passio 1 is studied in a realistic manner. It is delicately
shaded. The reader will find these comedies extremely light,
replete with the lightest banter aud wildest paradox. "His comedies
have a rapid and brilliant animation; their dialogue shows the
easy flow of the traditional French manner ; the plots are cleverly
wrought ; the comic characters, mere sketches, most of them lay
on claim to depth. The display of wit and verbal fencing
which go beyond life, and at times overreach themselves in a
sort of enthusiasm, would remind one of Congreve, were it not

* Oomptom-Rickett : A History of English literature.

•• Hugh Walker : The Literature of the Victorian Era.

( 199 )

that undercurrent of bitter self-consciousness which is felt behind
the mirth of their fanciful irony.”

The Picture^ of Dorian Gray is a beautiful novel in which
Wilde puts the best of his aestheticism. The entire work seethes
with a passionate yearning for youth and beauty. A complete
picture of Wilde's dilettantism is to be found in the two characters
of Lord Henry and Dorian Gray. Here, besides presenting the
aesthetic delight fot beauty, Wilde sows seeds of antidote to his
own thesis of hedonism, by depicting the inner ruin brought
about by the stubborn quest for pleasure. "Filled as it is with
the influence of French decadentism the book is strongly concei-
ved, and written in a very studied style. It is, moreover, whether
willingly, or unwillingly as sincere as it was in Wilde to be”

Wilde's critical work is to be found in Intentions (1891).
It is "a monument of sane and subtle criticism, expressed with
admirable ease and pungency.”

Two works of Wilde- TAe Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898)
and De Profundis published after his death in (1905), are works of
a different character. Wilde, who had been imprisoned for two
years on charges of grave immorality, wrote them in changed
environment. The Ballad of Reading Gaol is appalingly real.
De Profundis composed in jail is Wilde’s most touching and
pathetic utterance written in the prison. It is a long cry of the
^<Hll in agony. It is marked not with pose or atlection, but with
f'erfect sincerity His greatest literary bequest, De Profundis
moses us by its deep note of pathos.

Wilde's prose style in Dorian Gray and De l^rofwuiis is that
of an artist, and every line has the stamp of beauty, grace and love-
liness about it. The prose style in De Profundis scales higher
heights of success, and the poetic touches that bedeck it
have the quality of moving us to tears. The work abounds in
utterances welling out from the poet's heart, and every sentence
bears the burden of an agony that Wilde had experienced during
days of grief in the prison.

( 200 )

Q. 45. Giv€ yoar estimate of Robert Louis Stevensoi
(1850-1894) as an Essayist of the Victorian Age.

Ans Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894> was a man oi
versatile genius. He was a novelist, an essayist, a poet, a short
story writer and a critic. He could make his mark in every
field though it is principally as a novelist in the romantic form and
as an essayist, that he is best remembered. Here we will dea)
with Stevenson as an Essayist.

Stevenson’s fame to-day mostly rests on his essays contained
in Virgmibiis Puerisque, Famili'ir Studies of /\den and Books^ Travels
with a Donkey — '‘Essentially a collection of essays wrougt into a
whole,” Since Lamb there has been no more accomplished
essayist than Stevenson. Nature made him an essayist, and he
co-operated with nature, developing and strengthening the gifts
with which he was endowed at birth.”*

The essays of Stevenson cover a wide range of subjects.
They are a reflection of the author’s reaction to the objects of his
study^ and embody his views and opinions about a variety of
subjects. Literature, Nature. Science, child life, common
human life, religion, philosophy, morality form subjects for essay
and constitute the warp and woof of the essayist’s gamut. The
familiar essays of Stevenson are. Books that have influenced me,
Pan^s Pipe, C Hildas Play, Beggars, An Apology for Idlers, Chistmas
Sermons, Pulvis at Umbra, El Dorado, From a College
Window etc.

The essays of Stevenson arc delightful and entertaining,
marked with touches of humour, irony and satire. They are cm *
broidered with a delicate fancy. They exhibit tiis playfulness and
7 .cst of life.

What impresses us most in the essays of Stevenson is theii
moralising tone. He was a moralist and preached lessons of virtue
and good moral life. Henley’s “something of the shorter catechist'’
is an under statement. The ‘hum of metaphysics’ is always about
Stevenson. “There was not merely something but a great deal of
the shorter catechist in Stevenson; fundamentally, if we take the
phrase in a generous sense, there was little else.”** “Stevenson’s

* Hugh Walker : The English bssay and Essayis's.

•• Ibid.

( 201 )

philosophy limits itself to man, and in the great majority it is
ethical in its nature.^’

Heroism and optimism signalise Stevenson’s essays. An
invalid all his life, Stevenson did not allow his spirits to be
damped by thoughts of pessimism. In one of his essays we rind
the essayist voicing forth his determination to live well and with
loveliness and animation. “It is better,” he says, “to lose health
like a spendthrift than to waste it like a miser. It is better to live
and be done with it, than to die daily in the sick room.”

Stevenson’s primary interest was in man rather than Nature
or study of works of literature. This explains why the critical
portion is not prominent in his essays. His criticism of Thoreau.
Walt Whitman is not satisfactory. But his representation of human
character as in the essay on ‘Beggars’ is particularly sincere
and real.

Stevenson’s essays are intensely subjective. The essayist
himself forms the hub of his writings revealing his likings and dis-
likings and chatting with the reader in a familiar way. “In their
essential subjectivity, these essays bear some distant resemblance
to those of Charles Lamb; less artistically wrought, less richly
loaded with intentions, they make, as Elia had done, the writer's
personality the very centre of bis work.” ((]a:5amian)

Stevenson’s sStyle in his essays is laboured. It was a style that
he picked up by playing a ‘sedulous ape’ to great masters of
literature. There are echoes of Has^litt, Lamb, De Quinccy in his
essays. But he succeeded in assimilating them in a mould that
became bis ov n. Despite his obvious indebtedness to greater
writers, there is an individual flavour about Stevenson’s work,
the flavour of an attractive personality. He cultivated writing
as a craft. His skill in words concentrated itself in a sentence
or phrase or even in a word. “He devoted very attentive care to
the art of writing. 'He knew the anxious quest of the exact word,
the search for a cadence, at the same time harmonious and not too
markedly regular. His style is sufficiently nervous to bear such
conscious filing and refining. It draws its strength from a very
varied and supple vocabulary, in which the whole scale of learned
shades meets with the most racy vein— popular, technical or dia-
lectical words. At times the exquisiteness of the form seenis to

( 202 )

exceed the just demands of the matter, and this is the single
weakness of that prose.”*

Q. 46. Briefly examine the works of the Historians,
Biographers, Scientists and Philosophers of the Victorian Age.

Alls. Historians of the Victorian Age.

We have already dealt with the work of Macaulay as an
historian. Let us now take into account the works of other
prominent historians of the Victorian Age.

James Anthony Froude (1818-94).

Froude is undoubtedly the most brilliant of the Romantic
school of historians. His miscellaneous work was published in
four volumes called Short Studies On Great Subjects (1867-85).

History of England from the Fall af Wolsey to the Death of
Elizuheth (1856-70) was issued in twelve volumes. His other
books are The English in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (1872-
74), Caesar (1879), Ocaona or England and her Colonies (1886),
and Irish novel The Two Chiefs of Dunboy (1889) and his
controversial Biography of Carlyle.

Froude has provided us interesting glimpses of Elizabethan
life and historical characters like Henry VIII and Wolsey, Anne
Boylene and Queen Eli^^abeth. He has made the Elizabethan
period live, and has revitalised the old Tudor life of the sixteenth
century. His descriptions are wonderfully vivid and graphic and
his insight into human character is deep and profound. His literary
style is higly colourtul. It is beautiful. **lt is at once strong
and restrained, simple and sumptuous. His periods glow with a
subdued and chastened richness In place of the showy but
metallic brilliance of Macaulay, we have a delicately plastic and
exquisitely modulated style. It is less mannered than Arnold’s less
artificial than Dc Quincey’s, less florid than Ruskin’s.”*

Alexander William Kinglake (1809-91)

\\h The Invasion of the Crimea (1863-87) is a bulky work
rich in details. Eothen provides an account of his Eastern travel.
His style is tawdry though he captures us by his picturesque

Legouis and Cazamian : A Histoiy of English Literature.
• Compion-Rickcti: A History of English Lherature.

( 203 )

natcative.

John Richard Green (1837-83)

Greene’s •A Short History of the English People' is concerned
with history of the people and rarely does the historian make
excursions in the field of wars and high politics. The Making of
England (1881) and The Conquest of England (1883) are his
other full-length historical works.

Green has the art of making his pages live. He is graphic
in his treatment of history and is akin to Macaulay and Froude
in his faculty for dramatising history though he is more humanistic
than either of them. **To Green, the springs of our national
life lay in the history of the people at large. With his sensitive
and poetic imagination he makes everything live : a date, a
fragmentary record, a dull city Charter; he touches them with
the same vital significance which Ruskin accorded to economic
facts,”*

Edward Augustus Freeman (1823*92)

He wrote many works of history of which The History of the
Norman Conquest of England and The Reign of William Rufus
and the Accession of Henry the First (1882) arc significant.
“Freeman specialized in certain periods of English history, which
he treated laboriously and at great length. This, as well as his
arid style, makes his history unattractive to read but he did much
solid and enthusiastic work for the benefit of his students and
successors” (Albert).

William Hickling Prescott (1796-1859).

His best works arc The History of Ferdinand and Isabella
(1836), The History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843) and The
History of the Conquest of Peru His manner of narration

is plain add simple, and his art is different from Macaulay
and Froude.

Beside these historians there were many others of lesser
significance. Connop Thirll^ll (1797-1875) wrote the History of
Greece (1835-47). ‘‘It was a solid column of learning, crowned
by the lily- work of an attractive style.”

George Grotc (1794-1841) wrote the History of Greece in

* Compton- Hick ett : A History of English Literatute.

V 204 )

which he eul">giscd Athenian democracy like an idolatof. Thomas
Arnold, wrote the History of Rome. Henry Hart Milman
(1791-1868) wrote the History of Jews and considered them a
‘chosen race/ William Stubbs (1825-1901) came out with The
Constitutional History of England. Henry Thomas Buckle
(1821-1862) penned The History of Civilization in two volumes.
Buckle differed from Carlyle in not giving importance to
individual heroes. He held that, “in the great march of human
affairs, individual peculiarities count for nothing.” “Society was
conditioned by the laws of its environment.” Buckle made the
way for the scientific treatment of sociological problems. John
Robert Seeley (1834-1895) is famous for Expansion of England
(1883) *and Growth of British Policy (1895). He adopted the
comparative method and showed the interrelation between national
and foreign politics. Edward Hartpole Lecky (1838-1503) became
popular by his History of England in the Eighteenth Century and
History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemange vl869).
The reader will find in Lecky “a cool and reasonable debater,
slave to no theory — in short, an almost ideal political philoso-
pher.” Lord Acton ’ 1834-1902) was a scholar of great learning
and wrote The History of Europe. His outlook on historical
phenomena was ethical, and he was interested in the moral
problems raised by history.

Biographers of the Victorian Age.

Mrs. GaskeJRs Life of Charlotte Bronte is a brilliant
biography. It is noted for its sympathy, insight and tact.
Mrs. Oliphant’s Life of Edward Irving exhibits the author’s skill
in visualising character and portraying it with sympathy. John
Forster’s biographies of Goldsmith, Swift, Lamb and Dickens
are quite significant. He gives enough matter but does not
vitalise it with a lively spark of genius. Trevelyan’s Life of
Macaulay is a much better work than Forster’s. The biographer
exhibits a ‘real sense of perspective j^s well as a lucid and cultured
pen.’ Sidney Webb, Graham Wallas, Holland Rose, Lord Morley,
James Gairdner are other important biographers of the age.
Scientists in the Victorian Age.

Among the scientists of the Victorian Age, Charles Darwin,
Herbert Spenser and Thomas Henry Huxley deserve attention.

( 205 )

Charles Robert Darwin. (1809-82)

The chief works of Darwin arc The Voyage of the Beagle
(1839), On the Origin of Species (1859), The Descent of Man
(1871). He propounded the theory of Evolution which revolu-
tionised the thought of the age. 'The Origin of Species proved to
be an epoch-making book. It transformed the conceptions of the
people regarding natural history and changed man’s way ot
thinking on the problems of human society. His book is masterly
in the exposition of facts and proving their validity by argument.
The sober flow of his prose hardly betrays the slightest tremor
ot emotion. There is no art here but honesty.

Herbert Spenser (1820-1903).

**Spenser stands in a pronounced contrast to Darwin. He
more of the philosopher than the scientist; or at least; he is more
attracted to the process of generalising than to the long and
meticulous research which leads upto it. He is more skilled in the
handling of abstract ideas, and at the same time more able to
adapt his thoughts to the embellishment of form. He has been
charged with verbosity and pedantry, but the fault is to be tound
in the matter rather than in the style. He says what he wishes
to say without any undue expense of language; and his lighter
writings, as, for example, his articles on education, aft'ord
pleasant reading.” * His main works are Principles of Biology
(1864-1967), New Principles of Psychology (1870-72), Principles
of Sociology (1876-96), Principles of Ethics (lvS79-93), Education
(1861), Autobiography (1904).

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1892).

Henry Huxley — ^Darwins Bull Dog’ — wrote Eysays on
Controverted SuhJeclSy and popularised Darwdn's theory ot
Evolution. He attacked religion. For him “scepticism is the
highest of duties, of blind faith one unpardonable sin.” He
was the “embodiment of the scientific conscience and reflects the
buoyancy and enthusiasm which characterised the flowers of
Darwin.” His work is characterised by passionate integrity and
idealism. His style is trcnchaat and forceful. “He is assertive
and assured, merciless in exposing the weaknesses of his opponets.
In thought and style he is as completely representative of the

* JLepouiB and Cazamlao : A History of fioglish Literature.

( 206 )

values o£ knowing, as is Carlyle o£ those of conduct, and Arnold
of beauty of life.”* “He had a fine, lucid, literary style, a natural
aptitude for dialectics, and an impatience with the cautious
peradventures and hair-splitting logic dear to many theologians.”**
Philosophers of the Victorian Age.

John Stuart Mill was a philosopher, political thinker and an
economist of repute. As a political philosopher he defended liberty .
His sympathies were with the working classes. His main works
in the field of politics are On Liberty and Representative Government.
In philosophy he advocated the doctrine of utilitarianism laying
stress on the greatest good of the greatest number.

Alexander Bain and Henry Sidwick accepted the
utilitarian standpoint to a great extent. James Martineau
was another remarkable philosopher with an ethical bent.
Edward Caird formulated the Hegelian philosophy with a
literary flourish. Philosophical thought advanced with the same
rapidity as the scientific thought of the Age.

* Moo<ly^Lovett : A History of Engtish'Literature.

A CotnpeoD*Riekett; A History of Eoglish Literalura

THE VICTORIAN NOVEL

(THE EARLY VICTORIAN NOVELISTS)

Q. 47. What are the main features of the early Victorian
novel and novelists ?

Ans. The Victorian age is essentially the age of the novel.
During this period novel made a phenomenal progress. “This-
was partly because this essentially middle-class form of literary
art was bound to flourish increasingly as the middle classes rose
in power and importance, partly because of the steady increase
of the reading public with the growth of lending libraries, the
development of publishing in the modern sense, and other pheno-
mena which accompanied this increase, and partly because the
novel was the vehicle best equipped to present a picture of life
lived in a given society against a stable background of social and
moral values by people who were recognizably like the people
encounrted by readers, and this was the kind of picture of life
the middle class reader wanted to read about.*’^ The early
X'ictorian novel as cultivated by Disraeli, Trollope, Dickens,
Thackeray, Kingslake, Mrs. Gaskell and Charles Reade was
essentially a transcript from life, and instead of seeking inspira-
tion from the Middle Ages or the world of romance, the early
V ictorian novelists concentrated on the social, political, economic
aspects of Victorian society. Realism, sometimes blantant and
sometimes in the subdued key, became a characteristic feature of
early Victorian novel. The novelists came to close grips with
the problems facing Victorian society and sought to find a solution
to the rampant evils of the age. The novel, like other forms of
literature, became purposive in character, and ceased to be a
source of pure entertainment. ‘‘The Victorian novel-reader did
not want to be entertained, and in a sense he wanted to escape.
But he wanted to be entertained with a minimum of literary
convention, a mainimum of aesthetic distance. He wanted to be

* l>avid Daichea : A Critical History of Eagiish Literature.

( 208 )

close to what he was reading about, to have as little suspension ot
disbelief as possible, to pretend, indeed, that literature was
journalism, that fiction was history.”* The Victorian reader
found in fiction what he looked for, and the early^ Victorian
novelists provided him a historical perspective of the age in all
its varied aspects.

The early Victorian novelists were in accord with theii
public, and gratified the public taste by their enlivening pictures
ot life. ‘“They were conditioned by it, as of course any novelist
must be but for the most part were willingly conditioned by
it. Thev identified themselves with their age and were its spokes-
men.”** No doubt there is presence of the satiric spirit in
Disraeli and Thackeray, but inspite of the satiric shafts the noveli-
sts do not show a particular disgust with the age. There is plenty
of irony and plain thrusts in Dickens, but he is well satistfied with
the age in which he lived. “For all the squalor, sin, and pain in
the novels of Dickens, the impression left on reading any one ot
them is, that he believed as implicitly as Leibnitz that this is the
best of all possible worlds.

The early Victorian novelists did not very much bother
about coherent plots. The structure of the novel in the hands ot
Disraeli, Dickens, and Thackeray is loose and the progress of the
story is hampered by episodic intrusions, unconnected descriptions
and moral sermons by the novelists. The novels ot Dickens, the
chief among the early novelists of the Victorian age arc *oftcn
like shapeless bags into which all manner of different objects
of varying shapes and sizes have been ruthlessly crammed. They
contain something for everybody and the parts you do not like you
can more or less ignore.”f The same formlessness is perceptible
in the novels of Thackeray. To quote Lord David Cecil again
“Thackeray was a very uncertain craftsman. His hold on stru-
cture is very slack; he does not bother to weave the different
strands of bis theme together; loose ends dangle ill the air, no
careful revision has cut out the tufts of unnecessary material

David Daichtfs : 'A Critical History of English Literature
•>«! Walter Allen : The' English Npyel ; ,

) W- L. Cross : Development of English Novel
t Lord David Cecil : Early Victorian Novelists

( 209 )

that have accumnlated during the hurry of first writing/'

The early novelists of the Victorian age had a love for
history, and inspite of realistic touches in their fiction we can find
them working in the line of historical fiction left by Sir Walter
Scott. Dicken's o/ Tvvu CZ/to, Taackeray’s H Emondy

Kingsley’s Westward Ho, Charles Reade’s ,The Cloister and the
Hearth are historical novels of the age^

Q. 48. Give your estimate of Benjamin Disraeli (]Sf)4-81)
as an early Victorian novelist.

Ans. Benjamin Disraeli, the Prime Minister of England,
was an important figure in the early Victorian fiction. He was an
alien and a jew, but he was intensely interested in the social,
political, and economic conditions of England, during his times.
Me was primarily a politician and it is very natural that his
novels are political novels and embody his vision of an advanced
political society. “He is out only political novelist; I mean, the
only one saturated in politics; the only one whose intellect feasts
one polity.”* His novels, particularly The Inferne! Marriage,
Coningshy, Sybil and Tancred present many political and social
types sometimes with a kindly humour and often with a satiric,
biting irony and wit. His novels bring out the unelevating
comedies of political muddle and panic, and present in a vivaci-
ous style the lust for power and political ascendency. He
speculates with malice on the dubious political career of many
adventurers, and offers destructive criticism of the shams and
disasters which proved the bane of the regime of the Duke of
Wellington. "No one describes a ball, or a house-party, or a
dinner as well as Disraeli, for no one so quickly and neatly gives
one the foibles and background of the guests. His family histories
are masterpieces of irony. He knows the private cankers of
grandeur, the long machinations that have produced a Lord
^^onmouth or a Lord Marney. All his ladies are ravishing;
nevertheless, though never losing his sympathy for the female

* David Cecil : Early Victorian Novelists.

V.^S* Pritchett; The living Novel.

( 2i0 )

character and never ceasing to flatter he sets it oat with the
coolest impartiality,”*

His Works..

Disraeli began his career as novelist with the portrait o£ a
dandy, Vivian Grey (1826-27), who excels in shifly ways than in
morality and virtue. He is an adventurer with more brains and
cunningness than scruples. He is a young, ambitious and
dashing youth who thinks that he can achieve success by his wits
and audacity. He forms a political clique with the marquis of
( arabas, a seltish disappointed politician, as the leader He seeks
to create a new political party with the help of many discontented
peers and M. Ps. who join his group under his own leadership.
V^ivian Grey’s plans to set up a political party are foiled by the
machinations of the treacherous Mr. Lorraine. He is challenged
by Cleveland. He dubs Vivian Grey as a traitor and a man
of audacious ambition. In the duel Cleveland is killed and Vivian
(ircy leaves the country when he finds no one supporting his claims
to leadership in the party. He moves to the continent and passes
through many adventurers in love and politics in which he meets
with discomfiture and disappointments. He presents a sorry spec-
tacle in the concluding years of his life and knows himself to be
the most unfortunate and unhappy being that ever existed.

In the novels which followed Disraeli’s entrance into Parlia-
Tuent he expounded his views as a democratic Tory and founder of
'Young England’ movement, and unfolded his vision of progre-
ssive British imperialism. In Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845)
and Towered (1847) he directed the attention of the aristocratic
LUisses to the w^retched lot of the labourers, and worked for the
emancipation of the workers. He tried to stem the tide of indust-
cial individualism, starving and fouling the English countries
and filling the banks ot England with gold.

These three novels constituting ‘Young England,’ are
iliscussion novels based on political and religious questions. They
ire written from the Tory viewpoint against liberal
individualism.

In Coningsby (1844) Disraeli directs our attention to the
^K>iitical events from the passage of the Reform Bill in 1832, down

* V. S. Priichett ; The Living Novel.

( 211 )

to the fall of the Melbourne ministry in 1841. “These provide the
author with opportunity for expounding bis own political creed,
his contempt for the conservatism without principles which he
attributed to the party of Peel, his hostility to the Whigs and
utilitarianism, his condemnation of the new poor law and the
unimaginative treatment of the peasantry.”

In Sybil or The Two Nations (1845) Disraeli depicts the
conditions of the working classes in the early years of Queen
Victoria’s reign, and woefully laments the overcrowding in miser-
able tenements, the inadequate wages, and the ‘truck’ system. He
satirises the selfishness of landlords and employers towards serfs
and labourers and relates the agitation against them that led up
the Chartist riots. The Two Nations of the title refer to the two
classes of the rich and the poor existing in England during the
Victorian age.

“With this exposition is woven the story of the love of
the generous and enlightened Charles Egremont, younger brother
of Lord Marney, one of the meanest of the landlord class for
Sybil, the daughter of Gerard, one of the Chartist leaders. The
dramatic force of the situation is heightened by making Sybil
belong to the family of the last abbot of Marney, whose lands had
been plundered under Henry VIII.”

This novel exposes the wretched lot of the workers and
pleads for their betterment. It has great power to move. The
descriptions of miners and mines, and the riots that follow in.
the wake of distress are graphic and can move workers to agitation
in all times to come.

Tancred or The New Crusade (1847) is a jewish novel
vindicating the claims and destinies of the jewish race with a
humorous presentment of the aspirations of a visionary
young English nobleman to regenerate the world, Tancred,
Lord Montacute, is a jew. He has a bright political career
ahead of him. Instead of sticking to politics, he goes to
Jerusalem and thence to Sinai, where be receives the divine
command to promote the doctrine of 'theocratic equality.’ Later
on he falls in love intrigue^ and is completely disillusioned in his
life. In this novel Disraeli combined histrionic imagination
with a genius for the necessary compromises and calculating

( 212 )

realism of ordinary politics.

Efiitimate.

Disraeli is essentially a political novelist. The movements
of English politics under Queen Victoria can be studied better in
Disraeli's novels than anywhere else. His novels are purposive
in character, satiric in intent, and reformative in tone. They
exhibit his confident familiarity with aristocratic manners, and
present his political and historical imagination working on
fantastic schemes and ambitious plans. “His novels are flamboyant,
but it is the flamboyancy of a grandiose political imagination
in which high idealism and exhibitionist dandyism are oddly
combined.’'*

Disraeli’s style has splendour and brilliance about it. He
is generally splendid, dazzling and gorgeous, but sometimes he is
tawdry, vulgar and Hat. His epigrammatic wit and flashing hits
at artificiality and hypocrisy have given to his works their modern
appeal.

Q. N. 49. Write a note on the achievements of Bulwer
Lytton (1803—1873) as a Novelist.

, Ans. Bulwer Lytton was one of the prolific novelists of
the Victorian age. He was a versatile and talented novelist with
a great regard for his craft. He responded to the varying tastes of
his age and produced a variety of novels satisfying the changing
needs of his time. He has to his credit a number of novels
dealing with society, history, domestic life and roguery. Had he
written less with a sustained energy, he would have been among
the great Victorian novelists. *As it is, his work is only of a
secondary importance. His genius was essentially of a derivative
character. Compton-Rickett says, “Lytton’s work is distinctly
imitative, but it is dexterous and showy and exhibits a versatile,
if not a profound mind.” Moved by the craze to satisfy the
public taste, he sped from one type of novel to another with
great rapidity, but in trying to gain popularity, he sacrificed
pjofoundity, sincerity, and depth which are So very essential for
a novelist. Bulwer sought to be a realist, but he could oot

I avM Daichts ; A Cri lica i History of Fnglish Lite rat lire Volume II,

( 213 )

make substantial addition to realism in fiction. W. L. Cross, in
the Development of the English Novel points out that, “Bulwer
Lytton did not appreciably raise the quality of the realism of
current fiction. He was too plainly imitative, and he took as his
model not a realist, but a writer who had played fantastically with
real life.’'

In his first novel Fulklandy Bulwer Lytton imitated Godwin
and in the second novel Pelham (1828) he tried to combine the
novel of fashion with the socialistic novel of Godwin. It represents
the adventures of Pelham, a young politician in search of recogni-
tion in the fashionable society of his times. The Coming Race
is the romance of the future, representing the author’s visit to a
subterranean race finding refuge from the ravages of the world in
the bowels of the earth. The novelist pictures a blessed society
free from the evils of woe, crime, poverty and social injustice.
Here too the influence of Godwin is palpably felt.

From fashionable and political novels, Lytton drifted to
the composition of Historical Romances which had been
popularised by Sir Walter Scott, He produced five historical roman-
ces : Devereux (1829) The Last D iys of Pompeii (1884) Rienzi (1835)
The Last of the 3 irons (1843) and Harold (1848). In thess histo-
rical novels, Bulwer imitated Aeschylus and Sophocles and kept
aside playing a sedulous ape to Scott. He bodily put into his
mirrative countless details which Scott would have rejected or
sifted. His .method produced more history, less imagination,
and a slower movement.

Of the historical romances of Lytton the most significant
‘ and popular is The Last Days of Pompeii. In this novel Lytton
sought to picture in its rich and florid colours as possible the
gorgeous splendid life of the people of Pompeii before the unfort-
unate city was submerged and destroyed by the devastating valcano
Vesuvius in 79 A. D, The theme of the novel is ihe love of two
young Greeks, Glaucus and lone, and the villainous designs of
Arbaces, the girl’s guardian, who is enamoured of his ward. When
the city is overwhelmed, the blind girl Nydia, who cherishes a
hopeless passion for Glaucus saves the two lovers by leading them
through darknei i to the open light of the sea.

The next historical novel that deserves mention is The Last

( 214 )

of the Barons published in 1843. This work is marked with a
note of intellectuality and is written from the standpoint of a
philosopher and a psychologist. In this novel Lytton discusses
elaborately the social forces that were responsible for the disinteg-
ration of feudal forces and the rise of the middle classes. The fall
of the house of Warwick, the last of the Barons, is presented with
pathos, and the sympathy of the novelist is for Warwick, the
king-maker.

To catch the eye and appreciation of the middle class
J.ytton attempted domestic novels, the chief of them being. The
Caxton (1850) and A Strange Stof-y (1862). In The Caxtons,
Bulwei-Lytton narrates with gentle humour, the simple annals of
the Caxton family. He gives a pleasant picture of the father,
a kindly scholar absorbed in a great work, his uncle Jack who
pursues his mania for speculative enterprises with results fatal to
the Caxton family. Romance is added to the story by the attemp-
ted elopement of Vivian with Fanny Trevanion, a rich heiress.

As a novelist Lytton cannot be considered great. His genius
was imitative and derivative. He lacked humour, and was always
overstepping the border line between the sublime and the ridicu-
lous. "His chief faults arc insincerity and floridity of phrase.
Modern readers probably find most of his novels ponderous and
dreary; but half a dozen or so of his extremely varied books will
always find some appreciative and even enthusiastic admirers.”

Q. 50. Give a critical account of the main novels of
Charles Dickens (1812—1870).

Am. Charles Dickens was undoubtedly the greatest of the
Victorian novelists. He was a great genius and both as a nove-
list and as a popular entertainer he held the stage during his
life time. The popular craze for his novels went up with the
publication of his serial novels and more and more of Dickens
was demanded by the reading public. There is rarely a novelist
in England save Sir Walter Scott who had been in perfect tune
and harmony with his public. "If pleasing the public be itself
an art, then Dickens is one of our greatest artists. And it is
well to remember that in pleasing his public there was nothing
of the hypocrite or demagogue in his make up. He was essentially

( 215 )

a part of the gteat drifting panoramic crowd that be loved. Wc
may note here a very signihcant parallel with Shakespeare. The
great difFerence in the genius and work of the two men does not
change the fact that each won success largely because each studied
and pleased his public.”*

The novels of Dickens have an eternal freshness about
them. Custom cannot stale their charm, nor the change of fashion
can their alluring and enlivening vivacity. They have in them the
spirit of youthfulness and buoyancy. Their humour is of a spark-
ling kind and is a sufficient guarantee against the incursion of
gloominess and despair. is the one novelist of his school”

says Lord David Cecil in Early Victorian Novelists^ ^‘whose books
have not grown at all dusty on the shelves, whose popularity has
sudered no sensible decline, lie is not only the most famous of
the Victorian novelists, he is the most typical. If we arc to sec
the distinguishing virtues and defects of his school at their clearest,
we must examine Dickens.”

**Beginning as little more than a comic journalist, he soon
discovered his special gifts as a novelist, gifts which enabled him
to present to his delighted readers stories set in his own day or
the recent past in which the vitality of the characters, the enthu-
sfastic savouring of their physical environment, the movement
from comedy to pathos and from compassion to horror, and the
sheer high spirits with which he rendered eccentrics, villains, un-
h>rtunates, hypociises, social climbers, criminals, innocents,
i>ureauc£ats, self-deceivers, roisterers, are presented with an almost
reckless profusion.”**

Dickens’s Early Novels.

**Dickens began with a great sense of life and little sense
form, capturing the individual oddity, the extravagant moment,
^tth remarkable skill, and then marking time, as it were, until he
^•>uld introduce another such oddity and another such movement.”

Dickens began his career as a novelist with Sketches by Boz
(1836) a series dealing with London life in the style and manner
H Leigh Hunt. The next work of Dickens the Pickwick Papers
^^ttght the public eye and at once placed him at the helm of nove-

* W. L Long : Enthsh Litoratute.

'* David Daiches : A Critical History of Eoflish Literature.

( 2If )

lists excelling in humour and light-hearted gaiety. It was published
serially in 1836 — 1837. Originally the book was intended to be
written for a sporting club, a Nimrod Club, but since Dickens had
very little acquaintance with sports, the plan was given up. He
changed the idea to that of a general club for travel and investi^
gation, the Pickwick Club, and ‘‘only retained one fated sports-
man, Mr. Winkle, the melancholy remnant of the Nimrod Club
that nev<-r was.” The first seven pictures appeared with the
signature of the cartoonist Seymour who took up the work of
illustrating the events of Dickenses chapters. In the meantime
Seymour died and Dickens was left free to extend the canvas of
his work according to the play of his fecund imagination, lie
produced a novel that proved to be the most uproarious and
hilarious that the British public had so far known. The book
recounts the adventures of Pickwick and his companions. Winkle,
Snodgrass, Tupman and Samweller through numerous changes of
fortune that land then:» in difficult and straitened situations from
which they are extricated by the ingenuity and skill of Mr.
Pickwick, the eldest and the most experienced of the adventurers.
The novel begins as a burlesque, but soon moves into a
more substantial kind of picaresque comedy, where the interest
lies not only in particular absurd incidents but also in the wav
in which given characters react to new kinds of environment.
There arc more than sixty lively and sparkling scenes pf humour
with more than three hundred and fifty characters, some of them
making their appearance only once to win for them a lasting
place in our heart. “The incidents are loosely connected and
the chronology will not bear inspection, but in abundance o'
detail of a high quality, in vivacity of humour, in acute and
accurate observation, the book is of the first rank. It is doubtful
if Dickens ever improved upon it.”* Burlesque, caricature, satire,
comedy, the presentation of the English scene, the panoramic
view of life — these different aspects of the book are never fully
drawn together, they do not always rise out of each other but
exist side by side, so that Pickwick remains episodic, a bedside
book to be taken up and put down at any point, a picaresque

Albert : A History of Eng’i h Literature.

( 217 )

novel which stops simply because the author can think of no more
to say,”*

While ‘Pickwick Papers’ v as still in racy progress. Dickens
became editor of Bentley's Misccllanyy a magazine, for which he be-
gan Oliver Twist in serial form. The theme of this novel is the
pathos and innocence of childhood vis-a-vis the wickedness and cri-
minality of villains and pickpockets like Fagin, the old Jew, and
his accomplices, the burglar Bill Sikes, and the Artful Dodger and
Nancy. Oliver Twist is brought up in a Poor House dominated
by Bumble, the parish beadle. He is tyrannical, and one day when
Oliver ‘asks for more* than his usual share of food, he receives
a heavy rebuff from the authorities which ultimately drives him
out of the Poor House, to be claimed by a host of villains headed
by Fagin. Oliver Twist is brought up as pickpocket and a thiel.
He is sent on a thieving expedition where he receives a wound,
lie is rescued by a good man, Mr. Bronlow, but is again entrapped
by the rogues, who are ultimately brought to book and punished
severely for their nefarious and evil design. Fagin is hanged,
and Sikes commits suicide. Oliver Twist is restored to good fortune
and strange revelations are made about his parentage and relation-
ship with Rose, the daughter of his saviour. The novel ends on
a note of comedy, though throughout the work the tragedy of
persecuted lile is presented with a grimness and macabre
imagination of which Dickens was a master.

Oliver Twist is a study in crime and villainy. The moral
sense of the novelist does not allow the triumph of wickedness at
the end, Dickens shows that “vice systematically pursued does
not yield the delights gaily asserted by the romancers." Social
reform is suggested in the working for Poor Houses, and a strong
case is made out for the dismisal of flint hearred persons as
Humble. An spirited appeal is made for the better trertment ot
children. The reformative and idealistic tone of the novelist is
clearly presented lor the first time in Oliver Twisf,

“The book is full of nightmare symbols of loss, isolation
and incarceration. It is also a portrait gallery, (done in Dickens's
best style) together with a sense of vividly etched pictures of
physical locations and single incidents; it contains some great

* David Daiches: A Critical History of English Literature.

( 218 .)

memocable sceaes, but the humanitarian feeling that informs the
novel is not sufficient to give it adequate form. Oliver’s salvation
remains'accidental, and comes only when (and because) Dickens
has exhausted his ammunition.”

Before the completion of Oliver Twist in 1838, Dickens
began the publication of Nicholas Nickleby, again a reformative
novel, attacking the evil practices in some of the Yorkshire schools.
This novel is a scathing criticism of harsh and heartless teachers
like Squeers. and a fierce condemnation of the kind of teaching
imparted by the teachers in schools like the Dotheboys Hall.
The themes of suE^ering childhood and oppressive institutions are
united in Dotheboys Hall, a composite picture of the Yorkshire
schools which Dickens had personally visited.

"The central vision of human fate in Nicholas Nickleby
if it exists at all, is weak and unconvincing, and certainly ifi>
capable of drawing together into a complex artistic whole the
various scenes-so many of them magnificent in themselves in
the novel.”’^

Humphrey's Clock was to be the frame for his next
serial Old Curiosity Shop. In this novel Dickens portrays the
pathetic and miserable life of Little Nell and her grandfather who
are subjected to financial difficulties as the result of certain borrow-
ings by the old man from a sinister and iniquitious money lender,
Daniel Quilp, who harasses them mercilessly, till Little Nell meets
her death followed by her grandfather. The death of Nell and her
grandfather at once reminds us of the death ot Cordelia and King
l^ear, though the tone of pathos in the hands of Dickens crosses
the pitch of genuine pathos and slips into the kingdom ot
sentimentality. Whereas Shakespeare pictures the death of
Cordelia in muffled tones and gentle touches, Dickens presents the
djath of Nell with the resounding of the mourner’s pathetic cries.
The death scene of Little Nell has become the standard example
of Dickensian sentimentality expressed in an inflated and embart'
assing style. Lord David Cecil comments on the tone of pathos
in The Old Curiosity Shop, “Dickens had a natural gift for homely
pathos. But almost always he sins flagrantly againat both
which govern its use. He overstates. He tries to wring an

* Oafid Daicues : A cniical History of Bogiish literatuie.

( 219 )

extra tear from the situation; he never lets it speak for itself.
One would have thought the death of an innocent and virtuous
child should be allowed to carry its own emotion, but Dickens
cannot trust us to be moved by Little Nell’s departure from
the world unassisted by church bells, falling snow at the window,
and every other ready made device for extracting out tears that
a cheap rhetoric can provide.^'*

Dicken’s next work Barnaby Bridge is an historical-cuni-
romantic novel dealing with the Gordon anti-popery riots ot
1780 that shook England for a considerable time. *‘lt is a more
controlled work and a stronger one : in it Dickens first displays
to the full his ability to discipline melodrama into a sombre if
not quite a tragic pattern and to isolate individual eccentrics
lo a general atmosphere in which they seem somehow
inevitable/'

Martin Chnzzlewit is a formless work. Inspite of the
fact that it contains many fine characters and theatrical situations,
it cannot be placed high among the novels of Dickens. In this
novel Dickens concentrates on moral problems, rather than a
group of picturesque characters and incidents. He exposes
the seamy side of life based on hypocrisies, corruptions
and pretensions. Though there are numerous digressions from the
main thread, yet the attention of the novelist on the main theme
remains glued to the last. No doubt there are many scenes and
characters in the book who have no direct or even indirect relation
to the theme, yet its moral force is well pronounced. This novel
links Dickens more clearly to the other Victorian Novelists —
Thackeray on the one hand and George Eliot on the other-than
anything else he had written so far In learning how to discipline
his genius for caricature, irony, melodrama, and drollery to a
moral vision, Dickens took his place among the Victorians as
essentially one of them. The novel deals with the adventures of
Mattine Cbuzzlewit first in England and then in America. The
American life of Martin was portrayed by Dickens in an unsatis-
factory manner, and the novef failed to enthuse the American
readers. In this novel Dickens gives us some of his finished port-
raits. His minor characters do not play a significant part in the

* Lord David Cecil : Barly Vietoriao Novelists.

( 220 )

development of the plot but they are better remembered than the
main characters who figure prominently in the main threads of
the story. Of these supplementary characters who really deserve
our appreciation, the most well known are Pecksniff, an architect
and an arch hypocrite, Mrs. Gamp, the disreputable old nurse,
Tom Pinch, Pecksniff’s gentle loyal assistant, and Mark Tapley,
the optimistic and cheerful servant of Martin who follows him to
America.

Dombey and Son is the last novel of this period. It is a study
in the evil effects of pride and haughtiness of temper. When the
novel opens we meet Mr. Dombey, a proud, rich merchant. He is
the proprietor of the firm Dombey and Son. He has been blessed
with a son, Paul, though his wife dies in the delivery of the son.
Dombey proudly brings up his son Paul Dombey, and sends him
to Dr. Blimber’s school when he comes of age. Paul Dombey is
ill-treated and under the streneous discipline the boy sickens and
dies. Dombey, after the death of Paul, neglects his daughter
Florencej^who starts loving Walter Gay, a frank good hearted
youth in Dombey’s service. The proud Dombey does not like this
love affair and sends Walter Gay to the West Indies so that their
love may not fructify. Dombey marriages again, but his pride
and insolence dissatisfy his newly married wife who elopes with
Dombey’s manager, Mr. Carker, to France. Dombey pur-
sues them for they have bumbled him. Carker is overtaken at a
railway station. He falls in front of a train and is killed.
Dombey sustains heavy losses in business. He is completely
broken down. He retires to spend the remaining days of his life
in solitude where he is joined by his neglected daughter Florence,
who brings solace to his cheerless life. This novel is better formed
and has greater cohere icc than Martin Chuuzzkwit, It occupies
u distinctive place among the early novels of Dickens.

His Later Novels.

Among the later novels of Dickens, David Copperfield (1849-
50) is the best. It is Dickens's veiled autobiography. “The pen
which wrote David Copperfield** says Hugh Walker, "was often
dipped in his own blood.’' Dickens himself liked this novel and
remarked. "I like David Copperfield the best.” The life and
adventures of David Copperfield are, in fact, the adventoces of

( 221 )

Dickens^ the novelist. The figure of th^i immortal MacawHer is
the picture of his own father. Uriah Ueep, who stands for
fawning flattery and sneaking humility, Murdstone who typifies a
cruel father, Peggoty standing for a kind nurse, Betsy Trotwood
representing a benevolent though eccentric lady are the memor-
able portraits of this novel. Commenting on the excellence of
this novel Baker observes. *<Both critical and popular opinions
are at one in voting David Copperficll their favourite among the
novels of Dickens. First of all, it happens to be in large part
his autobiography. There is a plot in David (-opperfield, and
some of the largest episodes are as theatrical as any ever devised.
It is a tale of ups and downs, joys and sorrows, but the prevailing
tone is one of cheerfulness and confidence in the essential good-
ness of life. And though it is not entirely free from the
ensnaring device of poetic justice, this is not one of his didactic
stories. On the contrary, except for the exposure of Uriah Heep,
a few reformations of sinners, and the lurid tragedy of Steerforth,
all of which arc extraneous to the history of David this is tolerably
free from both moralism and melodrama.” ‘‘It is a prose poem
of love wedlock.”

Dickens's next novel Bleak House, was published in 1853. It
is a vigorous satire on the abuses of law courts, particularly the
old court of Chancery. No better exposure of the delays and
iniquities of the law courts is found in Victorian novels than in
this work.

Hard Times was published in 1854. It is a satirical exposure
of the evils of industrialism and the excessive love for money and
worship of machinery. In this novel Dickens turns his atten-
tion to the morality of the utilitarian industrialist and its effect
on the possibilites of human happiness. Gradgrind, a lover of
money and a man of practical wisdom, and Josiah Bounderby, a
manufacturer and a rich merchant, are the objects of satire. The
novel attacks gross materialism and upholds imaginative and
spiritual values in human life.

Little Dorrit, published in 1857 deals with the delays in
Cjovt. institutions particularly the Circumlocution Office and
Marshalsea prison. William Dorrit had to spend many years of
his life in Marshalsea prison. Through his character and expe-

( 222 )

fiences^ the evils of prison life are attacked. Reform in prison-
life is suggested in this novel. ^^Little Dorrit presents with
sombre powei» paradoxes of fate and fortune while incidentally
carrying the share of social propaganda (about prison conditions)
which is an element in nearly all of the novels.’*

A Tale of Two Cities published in 1859 is an historical novel
dealing with the events of the French Revolution that shuddered
the whole of Europe. The two cities are London and Paris. Scenes
change from one city to another. The main characters of this
novel arc Dr. Mannet, who suffered for many years in Bastiie,
Lucy Mannet, his daughter, who married Charles Darnay, a
h’rcnch aristocrat, Sidney Carton, the young lawyer who sacrificed
his life at the altar of Lucy’s love in order to save the life of
< Charles Darnay, Madame Defarge, the cruel, hard-hearted revolu-
tionary leader of the French and Miss Ptoss, who is the protecting
angel of Lucy. It is a literary work, rich in history and sound in
plot construction.

A Tale of Two Cities was followed by Great £xpecatians»
and The Mystery of Edwin Drood. The first novel occupies a very
high place among the works of Dickens, while the last one is
placed at a low level. Great Expectations is a novel of adventure
tecounting the trials and tribulations in the life of Pip, a youn^^
hoy, and the help that he receives from his brother-in-law
Joc-Gargery, a simple minded man, and the convict Abel
Magwitch, whom he had once provided food in the wilds of
London. The character of Miss Havisham, a rich eccentric lady
is unrealistic though interesting. Love between Pip and EstcILi
adds to the interest of the novel.

Edwin Drood i^ the last auiiuished novel dealing with
the problem of murder and its deteocion. Edwin Drood, an orphan,
loves Rosa, anollier orphan girl. They are engaged to each
other. Another young man Neville also, starts flirting with
Rosa. This brings Neville and Edwin Drood in conflict. One
night Edwin Drood disappears and is not traced out. It is
suspected that Neville has murdered him. At the special pleading
of Edwin Drood’s uncle, Jasper, Neville is arrested. Since no
trace of Edwin's body is found he is released. Vigorous attempts
are made to solve the mystery of Edwin Drood’s disappearance.

( 223 )

ljut no good conies out of the investigations. **When Wilkie
Collins wrote The Moonstone and Dickens, not to be outdone,
followed it with Edwin Drood^ wc begin the long career ot
iimrder for murder's sake, murder which illustrates nothing and is
there only to stimulate our skill in detection and to distract
with mystery.”*

Q. 51. Write a note on DickensS general reputaiioii as a
novelist.

Ans. Charles Dickens was undoubtedly the greatest novelist
ol the Victorian age. “He is the one novelist of his school"
says David Cecil, ‘^whose books have not grown at all dusty on
the shelves, whose popularity has suffered no sensible decline.
Me is not only the most famous of the Victorian novelists, he is
the most typical." He was the most popular novelist of the times,
ind C. E. Eckersley remarks pertinently ‘‘whether any English
writer has ever been so popular not only with one class or one
generation, but with all classes, rich and poor, young and old
alike." In his own country he was heartily loved and there was
a national mourning when he breathed his last. When Dickens
was buried in Westminster Abbey, close by the monuments of
<Jhaucer, Shakespeare and Drydcn, there was an unending stream
of mourners who came to pay their homage to the departed artist
who had brought cheer and sunshine to many homes. “All day
long” wrote Dean Stanley, “crowds passed slowly by : many
Howers were laid there by unknown hands, many tears shed from
unknown eyes.”

Dickens’s fame was not confined to England. He was as
popular on the continent as in his home country. He received
admiration and applause in America, Russia, Italy and Germany.
“Tolstoy” says David Cecil — “thought of him one of the few
supreme novelists that had ever lived, many critics have considered
him the greatest novelist of England.” Dickens possessed creative
imagination of a high order, and that accounted for the popu-
larity of his novels. “No English novelist had it quite in the
way Dickens had, Scott’® •nH Rmilv Brnnts's wer^

* Pfiichet : The Living Novel

( 224 )

of a finer quality; Jane Austen's |was more: [exactly articulated,
but none of them had an imagination at once so foicefuj,
so varied, and self dependent as Dickens’s. Indeed his best passages
have the immediate irresistible force of music. Unassisted by
verisimilitude or intellectual interest he sweeps us away as Wagner
docs by sheer dramatic intensity. That is why his popularity has
not declined.'’*

Q. 52. Comment on Dickens’s art of plot construction.

Ans. The plots of Dickens’s novels arc incoherent and lack
unity. They are marked with discursiveness and diffuseness. There
arc elaborate passages of description and redundant details which
do not seem to have a bearing on the development of the story.
His novels arc ‘‘often like shapeless bags in which all manner ot
different objects, of varying shapes and sizes, have been ruthlessly
crammed. They contain something for every body, and the parts
you do not like you can more or less ignore.”** Dickens freely
indulges in humorous conversations, and after pages of scintillat-
ing talks he is reminded of the main thread of the story, and
comes back hastily to the right lines only to abbeiate after a
short while. He then connects cld forgotton facts, “all the
harder to follow from the fact that the fallible human memory
has had to carry it unhelped through the long space of time since
he let fall his thread.”t Only in his later novels. Steak House^ A
Tote of Two CitieSy^nd Our Mutual Friend did he develop some-
thing like coherent plots, but the rest of his novels suffer from
formlessness and incoherence. “The main strands of his novel arc
knotted roughly together and the minor wisps arc left hangin^^

forlornly .”tt

Like most of the Victorian novelists Dickens did not conceive
the story of his novel as an organic whole of which every incident
an<i dharacter forms a contributory and integral part. Generally
he those a conventional plot and then adjusted it forcibly to a
setting and character which had no organic connection with the

• David Cecil : Early Victorian Novelists.

• Walter Alien : Six Great Novelists.

t David Cecil : Early Victorian Novelists.

It Ibid.

( 225 )

main thread of the story. In his earlier novels Dickens failed to
create unity of plot and tried to tie up the ends of the action
in the last chapter only. In his plots he was more concerned with
far fetched eccentricity, some piece of knavisbness, some unlikely
occurrence to deck his tale. He cared more for entertainment than
for artistic stories.

This formlessness and incoherence in Dickens’s plot arc
mainly due to his lack of intellectual strength which could nor
impose any form and discipline on the discursive matter of his
novels. “Dickens’s intellectual weakness meant that he had no
sense of form. He could not impose order on the tumult ol
his inspiration. Figures and scenes swam into his mind in a
coloured confusion. He just strung them together on any ,worn
thread of clumsy conventional plot he could think of.”* The
serial system of publication of novel and stories in magazines and
periodicals also accounted for incoherence and formlessness ir)
his novels as in the novels of W.M. Thackeray, his* contemporary.

Dickens was more interested in men than in manner^s.
His interest was in characters rather than incidents. In his novels
character is the main thing and plot is subordinate to character.
He agreed perfectly with Turgenev’s pronouncement that the
writer of fiction should begin with his characters and not with his
plots. Dickens did not bestow any care upon his plots, and
stretched and strained them to the utmost to accommodate his
characters. Once he had invented his personages and got them
going, he felt strongly that it was their business to telL the story
and not his. If they got out of hand and decided to have their
own way, he was more or less inclined to let them have their
way. He allowed them to talk themselves out to the full. And
when they had been wearied of talking, he again came to the
main plot to proceed it further. That was Dickens’s method and
he developed it into an art which he alone could master.

Though Dickens is not a master of plot construction, yet
as a narrator of his tales he is admirable. “He may not construct
the story well, but he tells it admirably," says David Cecil. With
the first sentence of the novel he grips the attention of the reader
And does not allow it to Iposen till the end. He introduces enough

* David Cecil ; Early Victorian Novelists.

( 226 )

of thrill and excitement, enough of the macabre to keep up the
excited interest of his readers.

“The plots of his dramas arc often bad, the scenery is always
admirable. Little Nell may be a theatrical figure, the sentiment
haloing her death, the cheapest emotionalism, but we sec the sett-
ing, the snowy churchyard and dark peaceful cottage, as clearly
as though we were there. The story of Dedlcck fauiily
may be as convention as a fashion-plate ; but the gloomy North-
lolk house where it takes place with its fading silks and decaying,
inherited elegance, and always outside the flat, Norfolk levels,
with the clouds brooding low above them, lives in the memory
for ever.*

Q. 53. Write a note on Dickens’s Realism, Plastic Imagination
and Morality.

Ans. The spirit of romance had attained its acme in the
hands of Sir Walter Scott, who had deliberately kept himself
aloof from the reformative and humanitarian consideration of the
Victorian novelists. The old world .‘of romance woven dexterio-
usly by Scott was rudely reduced to shreads and patches by
Dickens and his followers. Instead of turning their gaze to the
Middle and haunted castles of Gothic Romance, Dickens
and his followers sought to derive inspiration from real lire, from
London life, as they witnessed it. His readers were also well
satisfied with his preoccupation with reality rather than romance.

It was the ‘here and now* they wanted to read about; they were
not sufficiently familiar with the past to be curious about it. And
they did not want kings and 4ueens as the dramatist personae of
their novels; they wanted ordinary men and women like
themselves."

Dickens was a realist in his art, and for inspiration and
guidance he turned to Fielding and Smollet. Dickens portray®^
in his novels the life he had intimately known and witnessed as
a reporter. He had the occasion to visit circuses, pleasure
gardens, prisons, boarding houses, and the rich experiences
garnered from these personal visits were used by him as the

David Cecil ; Early VictoriaD Novelists, ,

( 227 )

warp and woof of his novels. The slums of Oliver Twist, the law
courts of Bleak House, the west-end of Little Dorrit, the waterside
of Our Mutual Friend, are scenes of realism repre5enting the
author’s love for real life.

Dickens was essentially the novelist of London-life. He
portrayed London streets, fog, lamps, courts and the life of the
middle class people whom he had intimately known. But his
presentation of all these sights and scenes of real life was not like
that of a photographer. He soaked reality with his imaginative
colouring, and presented in the guise of realism an idealised
picture of London Life. “As a whole his picture is not like the
life that people ate familiar with. The world, he sets before his
readers is a world of his own imagination.”* “What Dickens
gives us is not the bare hard fact,” says Hugh Walker in the
Victorian Era in Literature, “but the fact suffused with the glow
of a rich imagination.” God had endowed Dickens with a rich,
poetic and constructive imagination, and he used it like an artist
to make things better or worse than they actually were. Exagger-
ation coloured his pictures of life. His world, apparently real,
becomes the country of nightmare or Fairy land. “The world of
the Pickwick Papers is a cockney world turned into Fairy land
with Pickwick and the Wellers the fairies at the centre ; but the
novel with which Dickens followed it was Oliver Twht, and Oliver
Twist is a nightmare of a terrified child haunted by ogres.”**

The real, the great, the unique merit of Dickens is that he
brought to the service of the novel on imagination which though
never poetic was plastic to the highest degree, and by the help
of that imagination, he could create a world, which though
distinctly different from that of actuality has a distinct reality of
its own, and it does not exactly force belief in itself; it
forces suspension of disbelief, an achie>^ement achieved by
Coleridge in his poetry.***

To sum up out discussion, we may say that, “Dickens lulls
by the familiarity of his settings into the Belief that he is a realist.
But his realism lies on the surface and his pictures of London life

* A. B. Baker: English Novel.

•• Wallter Allen : Six Great Novelists

*** George Saintsbury : History of the English Novel.

( 228 )

are magnificent pieces of idealised descriptions sometimes as
fantastic as a passage from Notre Dame.”*

Dickens was at heart a moralist and an idealist, and inspite
of his presentation of sinful and sordid life in his novels, he had
no sympathy with it. He presented sinful life only to condemn it
at the end. “For all the squalor, sin and pain in the novels of
Dickens” says W. L. Cross, “the impression left on reading any
one of them is that he believed as implicitly as Leibnitz that is
the best of all possible worlds.’’ Dickens had faith in the
triumph of virtue. As an idealist and moralist it was Dickens’s
object ■ to expose the evils of the pursuits of robbers and
pickpockets. He depicted scenes of crime and degradation only
to condemn them at the end. He never ministered or pandered
to a morbid taste. He maintained the ‘purity of tone* in his novels
and invariably espoused the cause of virtue. His instinct is rather
to pick out the gleam of beauty from the midst of ugliness and
the example of virtue from among the multitudes of the viciou'o.
There are many vile characters in his pages, Fagin and Sikes and
all their crew, and there are many sordid scenes. Frequently his
taste is questionable, and at least one scene, the picture of spon-
taneous combustion, is loathsome. But such scenes and characters
are aberrations things not all of the essence of the method.”**

Q. 54. Write an essay on Dickens as a social reformer.
Ans. Corruption and evils were running rampant in every
nook and corner of the Victorian society and the novelists took
upon themselves a self-imposed task to eradicate the evils that had
already attracted the pens of the intellectuals. Among the Victorian
novelists Dickens was the greateet social reformer who directed
his pen to root out the evils of Victorian society. In almost;
all his novels whether sad or humorous, he laid his finger on the
drawbacks and evils of the Victorian society which Shakespeare
had already hinted in Hamlet i

The oppressor's wrongs the proud man*s contumely.

the !aw*s delay.

The wsolence of office, and the spurns

Cbmpton-Rickett : A History of Engiish Literature,

Hugh Walker ; The Literature of the Victorian Era

( 229 )

That patient merit of the unworthy takes.

Dickens was a humanitarian novelist and luckily for him
there was no Dr. Johnson to condemn his reformative zeal. In the
Victorian society, Dickens became very popular because he har-
nessed his pen for the amelioration of the suffering and pathetic
:onditions of the poor factory workers, little children groaning
under the whips of tyrannical school-masters, litigants moving
^bout law courts without getting any justice, and prisoners
subjected to the hardship of rigorous prison life. Dickens tried
to arouse the public conscience to these evils, though he alone
was not a poineer in reformative zeal which had appeared earlier
in the novels of Defoe, Fielding, Goldsmith and the revolutionary
novels of Godwin. But all the same in the novels of Dickens
the reformative zeal was particularly emphasised. After the
publication 6f Oliver Twisty Nicholas Nickleby and Old Curiosity
Shop, he was, to quote Prof. Cross, ‘*the greatest social reformer
for full thirty years.”

Dickens was no doubt a social reformer, but he himself did
not take up the cudgels in his hands, nor did he personally work
us a social reformer like Shafetsbury. His role as a social reformer
was simply to arouse the public conscience to these evils and
induce practical social reformers to introduce healthy reforms in
the contaminated stream of social life. Dickens blazed the track
tor other social reformers who had to pursue the lines of reform
suggested by him in his novels, for removing the evils and short-
comings in the world of education, prison life, law courts etc.

Dickens railed against the social, political, economic and
educational drawbacks of his times. In Oliver Twist Dickens
exposed the weakness of the Parish administration. The novel
^hows in lurid colours the misadventures of a poor boy, Oliver
who was born in a workhouse and fell in the hands of thieves, and
receivers who brought him up in the standards of Fagin’s academy.
In Bleak House Dickens shows law’s delay and the corrupt system
election. Elections in his noyels are always corrupt and
^^omic, the members of parliament appearing as strutting boobies,
i^ickens shows the caste system of the ancient regime in A Tale
<*f Two Cities. In Nicholas Nickleby he exposes the evils of the
charity schools, tyrannies of the school-masters and the lack of

( 230 )

education in England. In his novel Hard Times he exposes
thrcugh Coketown and Mr. Giadgtind the whole system o*
hissez faire system of the Manchester School, All these evils
were sought to be reformed by Dickens through the medium ot
his novels. He awakened the Victorian conscience and stirred
it for a better way of life.

Dickens’s zeal of social reform has been criticised by
Bonamy Dobree and Miss Batho in their book. The Victorian
twd After. “The pity is that this giant never grow up intellectuallv.
Whenever he touches upon social reform or anywhere begins to
think, he falls below the level of second rate but the generous
indignation that he shows is worthy of a full and complete man.”
The same view about the lack of reflectiveness in Dickens is
expressed by Hugh Walker in The Victorian Era in
LUtr ure.

It is proper to ask whether Dickens’s reformative zeal
lacks in reflection and ideas. Humphrey House says in The
DU kens “Whether it is true or not, (that Dickens lacked

reflective vein) the tact remains that a great number of his
contemporaries— not all of them fools by the standards of the
time— and a great number after him— not all so wise— adopted
his reformism seriously.” Several other novelists followed Dickens’s
reformative zeal and worked in his way. Charles Reade in hh
novel It is Never too Late to Mend shows the rigorous life ol
the prisons as well as the life of the colonies. In Hard Cash
he exposes the condition of private lunatic asylums, Charles
Kingsley in his fantasy The tViter Babies shows the evils ot
industtiaiisni.

Dickens was a social reformer but he was not a
blatant propagandist in the sense Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells
arc. Shaw was a mass propagandist. In his drama The Widower's
Houses he presents in lurid colours the evil of slum tenements.
In Mrs. Warren's Profession he deals with the problem of pro-
stitution. H. G. Wells was also a propagandist-novelist. He
satirised the ^educational impostures in The History of Mr. Polly
theological impostures in Soul of Bishops moral impostures in
The New Machiivelli and he attacked commercial methods in
Tnno Bungay. Wells’s method in eradicating social evils was quite

( 231 )

different from that of Dickens. Wells adopted the method of a
bully and a hector whereas Dickens achieved his aim by gentle
pursuasiveness. Compton Rickett rightly remarks, that Dickens
“proved to be that rare type of reformer who could moralise
with a smile on his lips, and mix his sermonic powders in such
excellent jam, that his contemporaries did not realise for a while
that he was doctoring them for their good.*’

Q. 55. Write a note on Dickens as a Humorist.

Ans. “The region where humour dwells” says W. L Cross,
“is somewhere between the real and the ideal, and wherever there
is a touch of reality or sense of reality, humour is bound to
appear. And so Dickens shares a good deal of the clement.’* It
IS as a humorist that Dickens will always be remembered. His
fame as a social reformer is likely to be eclipsed and overshadowed
by his perennial flow of humour. In fact, humour is the soul of
his work emerging not from his lips only, but coming out directly
from his heart and suffusing his entire work in its rainbow colours.
Without the current of humour in his novels, the sordid and ugly
pictures of life that he has drawn in novels like OUver Twisty
would have been simply intolerable. Dickens’s novels would
have appeared merely studies in the sinister side of life without
the leavening touch of humour. Further it is the irradiating spark
c»f humour that enlivens the dross, and gives to the novels their
vivacity and vigour, and their exhilarating charm. Some of the
characters would have missed their vitalising and enlivening
force had they been presented without the touch of humour. The
pretensiors of Winkle to sportsmanship in Pickwick Papers would
have lost much of their charm if Dickens had not imparted to
^hem a humourous colour. Hence for making out appealing charac-
ters and situations it was necessary for Dickens to present them
with humorous touches.

As a humorist Dickens stands next to Shakespeare. Referring
to the supremacy of Dickens as a humorist Priestly remarks in
.^his book English Humour 9 ‘‘Fashions come and fashions go, and
^uw it is the French who are the greatest novelists in the world
'<*nd now it is the Russians, but the supremacy of Dickens as
1 humorist remains unchallenged. We have only one name to

( 232 )

put beside his, as a cteatoc of humocous chatacter, and that,
of course, is Shakespeare.”

**The humour of Dickens is essentially a humour ot
characters.”^ Humour is produced by comic situations as well
as by comic chiracters, but in Dickens the main contribution to
humour is made by the comic characters. Dickens has create>l
a host of humorous characters, the chief of them being Mr.
Pater Magnus, Mr. Guppy, Mr. Jack Hopkins, Mr. Todgers,
Mr, Toots, Mrs. Gamp, Miss Nipper, Mr. Barkis and Mr.
Pumblechook. They are all humorous figures, and though
their oddities have been exaggerated by the novelist to make
them funny, yet they cannot be dismissed, as some critics have
done, as mere caricatures. They have real life and vitalitv
in them.

Dickens’s humour is of a variegated type. It is satirical,
farcical, and genial. Satirical humour is produced at the cost of oil-
icials, lawyers, fashionable people and bigwigs. As Glutton Brock
once remarked, ^‘Every one who fell into routine, who seemed '
to act inexpressively and with no sense of the fun of life was
turned by him into a marionette.” These formal and afiPected
beings are subjected to ridicule. They arc hit with a bludgeon.
Their weak points are banteringly exposed till they smart and
seek to hide their shame from public gaze.

The novelist imparts the touch of genial humour to lovable
simpletons like Micawber, Sam Weller, Pickwick and Toots. They
arc fine humorous figures and so long as we are in their company
we feel light-hearted. The blues of life are swept away in their
presence. Cares and anxieties cannot attack us after making;
association with the happy-go-lucky Macawber.

Dickens is thus the master of both the satirical and geniai
humour. “But Dickens’s unique position as a humorist” say*'
David CeciK “lies in his mastery of ‘pure’ humour, jokes that
are funny not for the satirical light they throw, but just in
themselves.”

In Dickens, humour is often combined with pathos.
Laughter and tears lie cheek by pwl in his writings. It • is in^
Dickens that we find the illustration of Banyan’s pregnant remark,
“Spmethlngs are of that nature ts to make one’s fancy cbuckk.

( 233 ■)

while bis heart doth ache.”

What is the secret of Dickens’s success as a humorist ?
The secret lies in his strong and curiously childlike imagination,
his astonishing energy and vitality, and the tremendous surge of
life. His wide sympathy and understanding of poor life also
accounted for his success as a humorist “Nor would he, perhaps,
have been a humorist at all, it he had not also that extreme
sensibility which makes him quicken to any warmth of heart.
With his very clear and simple outlook upon men and affairs,
his militant temper, his great energy he might simply have been
one of the most forceful and perhaps one of the crudest of our
satirists. But he was always swept forward on a wave of sympa-
thy and pity. He was a waif who suddenly found himself in
possession of a magic wand and remembering his own life in the
dark streets, waved that wand so that everybody might share, with
laughter and tears, the life of vast multitudes of the poor and
simple.”*

Q. 56. Comment on the element of pathos in the novels of
Charles Dickens.

Ans. Dickens was the master of humour and pathos, and
“iaughter and tears lie closely together in his writings and
frequently invade one another’s territory.”** Dickens had a
natural gift for homely pathos. He produced pathetic situations
and pathetic characters strong enough to wring tears fron
human eyes. Pathos, in his novels, rises either bv the presentation
of the unhappy and miserable lot of children and their death or
by the portray^al of the heart-rending conditions of factory workers
and prisoners in Marshalsea prison. The unhappy and miserable
state of Pip in Great Expectations, David in David Copperfiekl,
Oliver Twist in Oliver Twist, Little Nell in Old Curiosity Shop
inevitably leads us to sympathise with their unhappy existence.
The experiences of David Copperficld under the tyrannical control
of his step father Mr. Murdstone are extremely moving and
pathetic. The same is true of Little Nell wandering with her aged

* J. B. Priestley : English Humour*

• ' Compton-Rickett : A History of Eng’ish Literature*

( 234 )

grand father through churchyards and villages. Further, the
deaths of children create tender feelings for their untimely demise
and make even unaccustomed eyes to pay their humble homage
ot tears at the death of little flowers nipped in the bud. The death
scenes of Paul Dombey and Little Nell have caused endless tears.
They are written is such a pathetic strain that it is almost impo
ssible to restrain tears trickling down the human cheeks. “These
concluding scenes are so drawn that human language, urged by
human thought, could go no farther in the excitement of human
teelings.’* Dickens’s letters to his wife |are full of references to
friends crying or being thrown ‘into a dreadful state’ by reading
the death scenes of Nell and Paul Dombey.

Dickens wrung pathos by presenting pathetically the un-
happy lot of prisoners. The death of the Chancery prisoner in
Pickwick is truly pathetic.

As a master of pathos, Dickens followed the example ot
C Goldsmith, Sterne and Richardson. They were his masters in
the art of producing pathos bordering on sentimentality. Moses,
uncle Toby and Pamclla are the precursors of the pathctic-cum-
humorous characters of Dickens.

A charge is brought against the pathos of Dickens. It is
alleged that Dickens protests too much in his pathos and over-
draws pathetic situations. In doing so, he loses reality andbecomc.s
mawkish and sentimental. David Cecil in Early Victorian [Novelists
IS highly cruical of Dickens’s pathos. He says, “Dickens had a
natural gift for homely pathos. But almost always he sins
flagrantly against both the canons which govern its use. He
overstates. He tries to wring an extra tear from the situation;
he never lets it speak for itself. One would have thought the
death of an innocent and virtuous child should be allowed to
carry its own emotion, but Dickens cannot trust us to be moved
by Little Nell’s daparture from the world unassisted by church
bells, falling snow at the window, and every other ready made
device, for extracting our tears that a cheap rhetoric can
provide.”* W. L. Cross is of the same opinion. He remarks,
“The effect of Dickens’s pathos has, daring the lapse of a half
century, undergone change; it seems to be of a fanciful world

* Oavid Cecil: Early Victorian Novelists.

( 235 \

ftr removed from the actual. It no longer moves to tears, but
awakens rather a pleasing aesthetic emotion because of its poetic
qualities, most completely manifest in the marvellous description
of Paul Dombey’s death.* Hugh Walker says, ‘ There is a good
deal in Dickens that offends a critical taste, and not the least
his pathos, but this too we find to have been perfectly
acceptable to the critic as the general reader in his own
day.''

George Eliot was of the view, ^‘Dickens scarcely ever passes
from the humorous and external to the emotional and tragic
without becoming as transcendent in his unreality as he was a
moment before in his artistic truthfulness.”

Dickens’s pathos has the capacity to move us to tears if wc
are a little inclined towards sentimentalism. The modern verdict
is that the pathos of Dickens is overdone and too long drawn out
and that it shows a lack of self-restraint.

Q. 57. ‘^Inseparable from Dickens's gift of humour is that of
pathos." Discuss.

Ans. Unlike Richardson who has no humour, who minces
words and dotes on the sentimental vows of his heroines, Dickens
stands as the greatest humorist in English fiction. Humour is the
stuff and substance of Dickens's mental constitution and the essence
of his art. It is as a humorist that Dickens made his mark in
English fiction. Gissing appropriately remarks, ‘‘Without his
humour, he might have been a vigorous advocate of social reform

but as a novelist assuredly he would have failed As a

story-teller pure and simple, the powers that remain to him, it
humour be substracted, would never have ensured popularity.
Humour is the soul of his work. Like the soul of man, it permea-
tes a living fabric which, but for its creative breath, could never
have existed."

As a humorist Dickens stands supreme among English
novelists and his place is next to Shakespeare. No doubt
Dickens could never create a great comic chancter like Falstafl,
hut by his comic fecundity of imagination he could delineate “a

* W. L. Cross : Development of ttie Eogiish Novel.

( -236 )

whole population of drolls.” There are nearly a hundred
characters in Pickwick alone and nearly all of them are comic.
His comic characters unveil the fact that Dickenses humour
is broad, humane, and creative. While the humour of Thackeray
consists in intellectual wit and suggestiveness andi the humour of
Somerset Maugham is ironical, Dickens’s humour is not far
away from farce. Gissing says, ‘'As a writer of true farce I
suppose Dickens has never been surpassed.” Dickens’s humour
does not reflect the intellectual repartee of Benedick and
Beatrice, but it creates uproarious, vivacious and rocking
laughter.

Dickens extracted humour out of his characters as wc
extract juice from orange. By his rich imagination he invented
comic characters who give life and blood to his novels. “Dickens
lives chiefly now in his comic characters, but these are so numer-
ous, so astonishing, so altogether delightful, that a writer could
hardly wish for a better hold upon posterity.” It is impossible to
forget his comic figures like Mr. Micawber, Mrs. Gamp, Sam
Weller, Mr. Toots, Mr. Guppy, Mr. Sapsea, Mr. Peter Magnus
and Mr, Pumblechook. No doubt in the description of the
physical traits of his characters, for example the fatness of Sain
Weller and the caricature-like description of Mr. Pumblechook
“a large hard breathing middle-aged slow man, with a mouth
like a fish, dull staring eyes, and standy hair standing upright on
his head, so that he looked as if he had just been all but choked
and had that moment come to;” (Great Expectations) Dickens
has created humour, but we are amused to the core of our heart
when wc hear their funny talks. Mr. Micawer’s remark, “Some-
thing good is round the corner;” Mrs. Gamp’s remark, “Rich
folks may ride on camels but isn’t so easy for them to see out
of a needle’s eye” create guffaws of laughter. Mr. Toots falls
in' love with Miss Dombey but his love is not encouraged as he
says, “I know I am wasting away.” Mr. Toots states, “Burgess
&Xo. (tailors) have altered my measure, I am in that state of thin-
ness. If you could see my legs, when I take my boots off, you will
form some idea of what unrequited affection is.” In this way, the
thinness >f his legs is the result of his unrequited love. Mr; Pum-
blcchook in^Cren/ Expectations is also a humorous character. His

( 237 )

conjecture about burglary in the house of Mrs. Joe creates laughter.
“Mr. Pumblechook made out, after carefully surveying the
premises, that he had first got upon the roof of the forge, and had
then got upon the roof of the house, and had then let himself
down the kitchen chimney by a rope made of his bedding
cut into strips.’*

Dickens's humour is satirical as well as sympathetic. He
despised hypocrisy, vanity, greed, insolence of men and women
and he satirised and exposed those characters who practised
unfair means. In the character of Mr. Bumble he satirised all
selfish dispensers of public charity- In the character of Mr.
pccksnifF he exposed hypocrites. But his villains do not give
the impression of that humour which we find in ^the creations of
his sympathetic humorous characters.’ "These, the Micawbers,
the Wellers, Pickwick, Toots, and the rest, are always
lovable simpletons, who ask foe aod receive the laughter
of affection.”

Like Smpllett, Dickens showed the humour of funny and
ludicrous faces. *He was delighted, too, by the humour of old
tricks of speech, like the jerky, machine-gunning staccato, conver-
sation of Mr. Jingle, and the ungrammatical circumlocutions of
the uneducated in sentences from which they can only extricate
themselves by means of more and more relative clauses. He went
tar behind Smollett in the supreme sophistication which can sec
childish fun in the contrariness of inanimate objects. The ‘Veskitt’
button that won’t button was something new in English literature
— it suggests something of the Russian Gogol. Dickens explo-
ited to the full the absurdity of the apt or ludicrous unsuitable
name, and he loved to mock the humour of the professional
outlook — the overriding egotism which makes an undertaker
say that a beautiful funeral is something to reconcile us to the
world we live in.”

Dickens’s gift of humour is inseparable from his gift of
pathos. Like the Essays of Elia the novels of Dickens are replete
with a happy agglomeration of humour and pathos. Humour
with Dickens is uever far from tragedy. Through his tears wc
may , see the rainbow in the sky ; for his humour and pathos
cannot be separated from each othet* The quaint comment of

( 238 )

Johtt Buoyan is perfectly applicable to Dickens, ‘‘Some things
are of that nature as to make one’s fancy chuckle while hh
heart doth ache.”

In his life time Dickens’s vein of creating pathetic scenes
was highly praised by contemporary critics. Macaulay shed tcar^
over Florence Dombey. Jeffrey wrote to Dickens that he had
cried and sobbed over the death of Paul and felt his heart purified
by the tears. Thackeray was astonished by the heart stirring deatii
scene in Domhey and Sons. He exclaimed, “There’s no writing,
against this; one has n’t an atom of chance. It’s stupendous.'
Kuskin was moved t > the depths by the death of little Nell in Old
Curiosity Shop. But the modern attitude towards Dickens’s use
of pathos is not that of admiration and adoration. It is genera] )\
considered as “preposterously overdone, cheap, sentimental,
melodramatic and maudlin.” Prof. Hugh Walker puts forth

the modern reaction against his pathos in these words.
“Generalised, the modern verdict is that the path >s of Dickens
is overdone and too long drawn out, and that it shows a lack
of self-rcstain. In short, in his pathos he follows his usual
literary practice of exaggeration. His humour rests on exaggera-
tion; and he chose to set up his pathos on the same basis.
The question therefore is, did he obtain results artistically
good as he obtained in his scenes of humour? Hi> contempoia-
lies answered; yes men ot a later day, with few exception^,
say no.”

Lord David Cecil has pointed out th it the novelist should
take care “that the emotion he extracts from his pathetic situation
is inevitable inherent in it, and secondly that he is not overstating
it.” If the novelist attempts to exploit the emotion of his reader^
by a cold-blood and sterile process and oyer-emphasis, “he will
be nauseated instead of being touched.” His appeal will not bi
responded, and the pathetic situations will give the impression ot
theatrical performance. The pathetic scenes creited by Virgil and
Shakespeare could extract sympathy and tears out of their readers
merely because there were “no exaggeration, no dwelling upon
the subject, no beating out thin.” But the case is quite different
with Dickens. Dickens “wallows naked in the pathetic.” Albert
aiys, “His devices are often third-rate, as when they depend upon

( 239 )

^uch themes as the deaths of little children, which he desccibes
in detail* His genius had little tragic force. He could describe
the horrible, as in the death of Bill Sykes; he couid be painfully
melodramatic, as in characters like Rosa DartJe and Madame
Defarge; but he seems to have been unable to command the
simplicity of real tragic greatness.”

We come to the conclusion that the humour and pathos ol
Dickens are co-related, and that they arc the outcome of exagger-
;uion, over-emphasis and hypersensitive imagination. Compton
Kickett rightly remarks, ^^There are no great depths to his imagin-
ation as there are in Shakespeare and Milton, no such subtleties
as in Meredith and Thomas Hardy, but for acute sensibility he has
no peer in English letters. Thus both humour and pathos alike
are rich in inventive fancy.”

Q. 58. Write a comprehensive essay on Dickens's characters
and his art of characterisation.

Ans. Dickens’s interest lay in characters rather than inci.
dents. He was a master in the art of characterisation and
presented a wide variety of characters in his novels. In a way
Dickens's, to borrow Dr. Johnson's remark for Fanny Burney, was
*^he ‘greatest character monger’ among the Victorian novelists.

( ie had that joy in the varieties of character that Chaucer and
Shakespeare had, and to a degree shared by none but these great
masters of art.

*In Dicken's novels we come across three or four widely
did'erent types of character, first the innocent little child like
Oliver, Joe, Paul, Tiny Tim and Little Nell, appealing powerfully
to the child love in every human heart; second the horrible or
grotesque foil, like Squeers, Fagin, Quilp, Uriah Heep and Bill
Sykes; third the grandiloquant or broadly humorous fellow, the
tunmaker, like Micawber and Samweller; and fourth, a tenderly or
powerfully drawn figure, like Lady Dedlock of Bleak Mousey and
Sydney Carton of A Tale of Tow Cities which rise to the dignity
of true characters/’*

It has been alleged that Dickens’s characters are conceived
W. J. Long : English Literature.

( 240 )

ds caricatures rather .than living human beings with the note of
reality and solidity about them. This feeling rises due to the fact
that he exaggerates the oddities and eccentricities of his characters
to such a degree that they appear to be caricatures. **As in the
treatment of fact, so in character-building, the essence of Dickens’s
art is grotesque exaggeration. Like Smollet, he was on the look-
out for some oddity which for his purpose be made more old than
it was.”* His Micawber, PicksnifF, and Mrs. Gamp appear to
be caricatures rather than real human beings.

The reason why the characters of Dickens appear to be like
caricatures is perhaps due to the fact that while portraying his
characters Dickens lays greater emphasis on their individuality. As
Trollope shows living man in his social relations, and Dostoeievski
as soul aspiring to God, so Dickens shows his characters as
individuals. Walter Allen defends Dickens against the charge ot
creating caricatures. Ho says, “Dickens’s characters are often said
to be caricatures or to be exaggerated. I do not think this is true :
they are all so sharply differentiated from one another as to bo
plainly the product of intense accuracy of observation. But the
intense observation is that of the child or rather of some one who
has kept the eye of childhood.”** Even his caricatures live in their
own right and are delightful in their own way. They are not pale
shadows, but livings beings, each marked with certain peculiarities
of their own. “His books arc like mobs, huge seething chaotiemobs,
but mobs in which there is no face like another, no voice but reveals
in its lightest accents a unique unmistakable individality.”t
Dickens’s characters are not real” as life is ?‘real”. If they were,
they would be bad art, for literature is not life.’ “There is noth-
ing like them in life write Batho and Dobrec, “but life is poorer
for being without them. If Providence did not create Mrs. Gamp,
Chadband and the rest of them, it ought, we feel, to have
done so.”

“What he meant by his characters it was a habit of Dickens
to indicate by the names he gave them; as Lord Mutanhed, the
Artful Dodger, the Barnacles, and Mr. Hamilton Veneering* They ,

• W L, Cross : Developmen t of the P.nglish Novel.

•• Walter Allen : Six Great Novelist,
t David Cecil ; liar ly Victoiiao Novelists.

( 241 )

are, all o£ them, humorous, highly idealised, and yet retaining so
much of the real that we recognise in them some disposition of
ourselves and of the men and women we meet. The number of
these humorous types that Dickens added to fiction runs into
thousands ; it is by far the largest single contribution that has
ever been made.”*

Dickens’s characters are not merely individuals but also
symbolic figures. Some of his characters are like the humours
of Benjonson, but through their humours, their traits have been
universalised. '“Thus PicksnifF is not only Mr. Picksniff, he is the
type of all hypocrites; Mrs. Jelyby is not only Mrs. Jelyby. she
is also the type of all professional philanthropists; Mr Sergent
Buzfiiz is the type of all legal advocates. Like the writers of
the old moralities, Dickens peoples his stage with virtues and vices,
and like them he does it gaily, presenting them as no frigid abs-
tractions, but as clowns and zanies thwacking their bladders,
exuberant in motley and bell.”**

Dickens adopted the method of investing nis individual as
well as symbolic characters with a distinctive utteiance which is
used by that character and by no one else. His eccentric as well
as sane characters are invested with a peculiar mode of speech. We
at once rccbgnize Mrs. Gamp from the rhythm of her speech.

He had another method of giving individuality to his
characters. He had a great knack for ‘tagging’ his characters.
Sometimes the tag is physical as in the case of Mr. Carker’s teech
or uncle Pumblechook, and sometimes it is a speech-tag like,
“I never will desert Mr. MicawbeeV or John Jarndyce’s frequent
reference to the east wind.

Dickens was a past master in drawing characters drawn
from the poor classes of society or the middle class, for his
knowledge of these classes was personal. He failed to portray
characters drawn from aristocratic or upper circles of society
for his kno^lege about them was deficient. He did not possess the
Shakespearean imagination of depicting characters drawn from
kings, nobles, lords even without having acquaintance or know-
ledge about them. When he came to the upper class society he

* W, L. Cross : Developmeotof the English Novel.

David Cecil : Early Victorian Novei>sis.

( 242 )

failed and his characters drawn from that life seemed to be
theatrical rather than real. Miss Havisham in Great Expectation^
and Betey Trotwood in David Copperfield unreal and theatrical
figures. **Society» he did not know at all, and above the rank of
the lower middle class his knowledge grew more and more
scanty. The assertion that he could not delicate a gentleman in
the conventional sense of the word is substantially true.*’*

The charge that Dickens could not draw a gentleman has
not been accepted by Gissing. “I cannot fall in with the common
judgment that Dickens never shows us a gentleman. Twice,
certainly, he has done so, with the interesting distinction in one
(John Jarndyce) he depicts a gentleman of the old school, and in
another Mr. Crisparkle, a representative of the refined manhood
which came into existence in his later years. ^*In John Jarndyce
I can detect no vulgarity; he appears to me compact of good
sense, honour and gentle feeling. Mr. Crisparkle has breezy
manner, athletic habits, pleasant speech and they give no bad idea
of the classical tutor who is neither an upstart nor a pedant.”**
The truth seems to lie midway. Dickens could not certainly
portray characters belonging to the aristocratic classes, but he
could picture characters in whom qualities of dignity, honour and
honesty were well embodied.

Dickens could not portray serious characters in whom spi-
rituality and chivalry were embodied. Psychologically complex
characters were beyond his range and scope. He treated his
characters from ‘without', without going to the heart of them. He
stands contrasted with George Eliot in this direction. But he
excelled all novelists of England in portraying humorous, gay,
eccentric and whimsical characters; They are his masterpieces.
Micawber, Sam Weller, Pickwick, Winkle arc unforgettable figures
for in them there is something of abnormality and whimsicality.

“A third type of character which Dickens developed, and
which in his time made immensely for his popularity, was that of
the victim of society — usually a child. The possibility of child-
hood for romance or pathos had been suggested by Shakespeare,
by Fielding and by Blake; but none of these had brought children

* Hugh Walker : The Literatuie of the Victorian Era. i

** Gissing : Charles Dickens.

( 243 )

into the very centre of the action, or had made them highly
individual.”*

In fact, as Compton-Rickett says, ‘‘Dickens is capital at a
baby.” His child characters, David Coppcrfield, Oliver Twist,
Paul Dombey, Tiny Tim, Little Nell arc all real and sympitheti-
cally drawn. The fact is that Dickens did not describe a child—
he became a child for the time being. He lived over again his
own days of childhood in his child characters and that is why they
are so real, moving and life-like without any theatricality about
them. “Of Dicken’s true and deep sympathy with childhood
there can be no doubt; it becomes passionate in the case of little
ones doomed to suffering by a cruel or careless world.”**

The female characters of Dickens have been regarded as
feeble or artificial. Women in love have been portrayed with
little understanding of sex-life. The tragedy of sensitive, ill-used
children is a tragedy that Dickens could draw with force, tender-
ness and imaginative insight, but the tragedy of love, the tragedy
of fitful passion, of futile affections, the tragedy of Juliet, of
Maggie Tulliver, of Tess, is outside his range altogether. He could
only deal successfully with eccentric women like Betsy Trotwood,
Miss La Credvy, and Miss Pross. In his women characters we
find him at his best when shrewd observation, rather than psycho-
logical analysis is called for. Taken on the whole, we must
pronounce Dicken’s women characters as defective, except where
they are either eccentric or disagreeable.

Dickens’s main villains arc Fagin, Sykes, Uriah Heep,
Scrooge and Quilp. They are horrible figures and are bent on
evil. The moral sense of Dickens does not allow them to go scot
free at the end. They are accorded condign punishment. The
villains are presented in their villainies so that guileless persons
may be prepared against their crooked and treacherous ways by
understanding 'their nefarious modes of operation. They are
exposed at the end. But all the same we do not hate these
villain^. “For to hate Sykes, Fagin, Uriah Heep, Scrooge, and
all the other villains, freaks and misfits who whine and roar their
vay through his books, is really to love them, because they are

* Moody-Lovett ; A History of English Literature.

* ' Geerge Gissing : Charles Dickens. *

( 244 )

tangible, they take us by the heart, and enlarge our acquaintance
not only with humanity as it is, but as it might become if life
should but take another slant.* *

Lord David Cecil directs our attention to the defects in
Dickens's characterization in Early Victorian ATnve/to— ''Dickens
often fails over his characters. His serious characters, with a few
briJliant exceptions like David Copperfield, are the conventional
virtuous and vicious dummies of melo-drama. He cannot draw
complex, educated or aristocratic types. And, what is more un-
fortunate, even in his memorable figures he shows sometimes an
uncertain grasp of psychological essentials. He realises personality
with unparalleled vividness; but he does not understand the
organic principles that underlie that personality. So that he can
never be depended upon, not to make some one act out of charac-
ter. Montague Tigg, that harmless good companion, turns with-
out a word of warning into a sinister conspirator; Mr Micawber,
king of congenitally inefficient optimists, is transformed by a
wave of Dickens's wand into a competent magistrate. It is, as
though, in the last chapter of Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
were to inform us that Mr. Collins, became the secret paramour
of Lady Catherine dc Brough.'***

‘^Finally, there is what Gissing calls his inability, to ‘develop
character through circumstance.' He progressed towards this end
also in his later novels, and in Pip he had at least on striking
success. But in general, he does fail here. Yet when I say that
he fails I am merely meeting the heathen on their own ground, for
a man cannot fail at what he has never set out to do. As
('hesterton might say, his characters often fail as human beings
but they rarely fail as godd. Adopt the under realistic ideal,
develop your characters through circumstance, subject them to
the .vicissitudes of existence, and what is the result ? If you
succeed, you have created a semblance of life. But Dickens was
creating more than life; he was creating immortality. The charac-
ters described in a realistic novel are dead when the book is over,
but nobody is dead in Dickens who was ever alive. Pecksniff and
Mrs. Nickleby illustrate the curious paradox that external Uf^

* Richard Church :The Growth of the fioglish Novel.

* David Cecil ; Early Victorian Novelists.

( 245 )

)n this planet is the exclusive prerogative of those ho have never
ived in the fleshy they go on for ever in a land beyond a land.
S,nd they could not do that if they were not in some sense as
dickens’s detractors point out static characters/**

Q. 59. Write a note on Dickens’s descriptive power and

»t}ie.

Ans. DickenSi’s descriptive power is best presented in the
Icscriptions of Nature and countryside. “This power ot sugges-
ing a country atmosphere is remarkable in Dickens. He hardly
ver mentions a tree or flower by its name; he never elaborates—
)crhaps never even sketches — a landscape, yet we sec and feel the
>pen air surroundings. The secret is his own delight in the road
ind the meadow, and his infinite power of suggestion in seemingly
inconsidcred words.” (Gissing). The backgrounds are painted
vith an ample brush, and the lavishness of details breathes a kind
exhilaration. His descriptions of journeys from country to
own abound in rich observation. External appearances are
described with gusto. The inner workings of the mind and
ncntal states are left untouched.

“Dickens is one of the masters of prose, but in a sense that
■^arries qualification. He cannot be compared with Thackeray for
low of pure idiom, for command ot subtle melodies. He is often
nannered to the last point of endurance; he has one fault which
offends the prime law of prose composition. For all that he made
inique use of the English language.”**

In the beginning Dickens possessed admirable qualities,
commanded vigour, variety and a soundness of construction,
dealing for the greater part with vulgarity, his Sketches by Boz
^ free from vulgarism. It is never allowed to be slovenly.
‘Slovenly English he never wrote; the nature of the man made it

mpossible.”t

The highest quality of Dickens’s style is movement. He was
ihe master of a racy narrative. In the story of David Copperfield’s

^agenkneebt: Cavalcade of the Eogfisb Novel,
l^avid Cecil : Early Victorian Novelists.

George Gissing : Charles Dickens.

( 246 )

joutncy on the Dover road, wc have as good a piece of namti\e
prose as can be found in English.

Dickens often wrote metrical prose. The five-foot cadence
IS flagrant in the following lines from the American Notes — “But
bring him here, upon his crowded deck/strip from his fair youmr
wife her silken dress/ Pinch her pale cheek with care and much
privation*' and so on. One is inclined to feel that Dickens did it
deliberately as an improvement on plain prose.

But Dickens could write plain prose without metre when
he chose. In Barnahy Rugde^ his style is simple, dire:t and
forcible, “There are no interruptions of metre; the periods are
flowering, the lingua ge is full of subdued energy.'*

Dickens had the art of suggestion at his command. He
could both suggest and describe graphically. He could be poetic
in his descriptions whenever he liked, parti ularly in the death
scene of Little Nell.

“When Dickens writes in his pleasantest mood of things
cither pleasant in themselves or especially suggestive of humorous
reflection his style is faultless, perfectly suited, that is to say, to
the author’s aim and to the matter in hand.***

“I suppose there is no English writer, perhaps no writer in
any literature, who so often gives proof of minute observation. It
is an important source of his strength; it helps him to put people
and things before us more clearly than, as a rule, we should over-
selves see them.”**

Q. 60. Write an essay on Dickens as a representative
Victorian Novelist.

or

What features of the Victorian Novel are present in the
works of Dickens ?

Ans. Literature reflects the spirit of the age out .of which
it springs. There arc only a few artists who can escape the
iafliience of the spirit of the age. Generally 3p!eaking an artist is
a product of his age. The only difference between a great artist

George Ois&fiig : Charles Dickens,

Ihtd,

( 247 )

,ncl an ordinary artist is that the former rises above the limita-
ions imposed on him by the age whereas the latter fails to rise
jeyond itJ Shakespeare belongs as much to the Elizabethan age
ls any other Elizabethan dramatist ; but he is great, because
ie manages to rise higher than the limitations that might well
lave been imposed on him by his age.

The position of Dickens resembles that of Tennyson,
le would have been a greater poet, had he not cared so
iiuch for the age in which he lived. But, on the other hand, it
s doubtful if he would have been a poet at all, had he not been
I Victorian. The same seems to be true of Dickens also.
Mmost all that is bad about Dickens belongs to his age. He
represents the Victorian Age as much as Tennyson. The only
liiTerence is that of medium. The other might be that of art
ind craftsmanship.

Dickens is essentially a novelist of the Victorian London —
:he London of 1820*s and 1830’s. He presents the Victorian
[.ondon in all its colours, with its squares and shops and oHices
and murky slums and prisons and clamorous thorough-fares, its
:hurches striped with soot, its suburbs with their trim cottages
and tidy gentle spaces of open country. In depicting the horrors
:jf prison life or the abomination of private schools, his heart
is moved and he presents them to his readers, surely for the
better. He knew his people best and gave them what
they wanted.

“Dickens never wrote down to his public. He was a part
of his public. His books were not made ; they were born. They
were begotten by him of his public. He is like the primitive
tolk-bard in this.”*

But the difficulty with him was that he himself was too
much of the age. Like the Victorian public, he was himself a
sentimentalist. He failed to bring about any substantial social
changes since he more or less agreed with the contemporary
social institutions. He was not a revolutionary like Shelley os
This may lead the Marxists to claim that he disfigures
Reality and is a bourgeois artist. .But this is the thing that
makes him so thoroughly a Victorian. His novels are pen-portraits

'^sgenknecht ; Cavalcade of the Kogllsh Novel.

( 248 )

o£ the Victorian scene. They ace coloured in the sentimentalism
because the Victorians living in an age o£ doubts and disputes,
saw everything through a coloured glass. To present the coloured,
vague and hazy Victorian atmosphere, Dickens discoloured his
own vision. He did in Rome as Romans do.”

We have already discussed the problem of realism in th
novels of Dickens in the previous question. We may here tcpcAi
that his novels, inspire of the white-flag of compromise, represent
the Victorian age almost in toto. And, to be more emphatic
about it, is not the white-flag of compromise itself a dominant
feature of the Victorian Age of Chesterton’s phrase? The Victorian
compromise sums it all up.

Dickens is not only a representative novelist of the Victorian
age, but he is also a typical Victorian novelist. Lord David
Cecil points out some general characteristics of the Victorian
novels. He says that the Victorian novels are an extraordinary
mixture of strength and weakness. He illustrates this point with
special reference to Dickens — all the more to our advantage.
“There is,” he says, “hardly a book of Dickens which is not
deformed by false sentiment, flashy melodrama, wooden characters;
as often as not the hero is one of them.”

Speaking of the Victorian novels in general. Lord Cecil
says, “Their stories consist of a large variety of characters and inci-
dents clustering round the iigure of a hero, bound together loosely
or less loosely by an intrigue and ending with wedding bells.''
Nothing better can be called in evidence than Oliver fwhty David
Copperfield and Great Expectations* Most of the Victorian
novels are novels of character and their plots are weak. This
is what we find in Dickens also. The end of Great Expectations is
a remarkable instance at hand. It is difficult to imagine any
aesthetic justification for marrying Pip to Bstella. “Dickens
chooses,” says Lord David Cecil, “a conventional plot, generally
a highly unlikely one, and then crams it as by physical
violence on to a setting and character with which it has no
organic connection.”

Further, the Victorian novels are also remarkable for their
heavy moralisings and preposterously rhetorical style. The middle
class morality is always a dominating feature of the Victorian

( 2,9 )

novels. Probably only in Vanity Fair we seem to go off the track.
Dickens is thoroughly traditional in this respect. Thomas Hardy
was greeted with abuses when he set out to break these taboos.
But Dickens preferred to adhere to the public taste. Sex is care-
fully ruled out from the novels of Dickens since sex was a taboo
in the Victorian age. It was the age of readers that did not
tolerate Clare taking young girls across the stream and Dickens
knew his public.

Then we have the heavy sentimental style. A modern
novelist requires very few words to describe the external features
of his characters. But the Victorians devoted pages to the des-
criptions of their characters. Even Thomas Hardy failed to shake
off the influence of this what Mr. Bateson calls heavy — Gothic —
Style. Dickens exhibits this peculiarity in almost all his novels.
Here is a characteristic description : —

*'//e was a bushy man of an exceedingly dark complexion^
with an exceedingly large head^ and a corresponding large hand.
He was prematurely bald on the top\of his head..."^ (Great Expectations)

Deeper problems of human life are also ruled out from the
scheme of the Victorian novels. This limitation is a characteristic
feature of all the Victorian novelists, of Dickens no less. The most
successful creations of the Victorian novelists arc ‘Character-parts,’
sufferings of child life. Dickens is primarily interested in presenting
the sorrows, sufferings and privations suffered by his child charac-
ters. The hardships borne by David Copperfield, under the tyrannical
domination of Mr. Muf’dstone and Miss Murdstonc are brought
out in a touchingly tender manner. We are inclined to shed tears
for the lot of little David as he washes bottles and suffers the
pangs of penury. A similar fate falls Oliver Twist, who again
wins our sympathy for the cruel treatment meted out to him by
parish administrators and mentors of Workhouses. When Oliver
Twist asks for more food and is reprimanded by the dispenser, we
feel sympathy for the poor boy. The lot of Pip in Great Expect-
ationsy in the earlier chapters, is equally touching and moves us
to sympathy for him. The wanderings of Little Nell with her
grand father are heart-rending and pathetic. Her death moves us
to teats. Dickens, thus focusses attention, primarily in presenting
the afflictions, woes and sorrows of children in his novels.

( 250 )

But the question is — “Why did he choose children ?” The
reason seems to be that by showing those poor little chaps exploi-
ted by the bourgeoisie and capitalists, he could perform his duties
of a social reformer pretty satisfactorily. This might have been
one of the important reasons since this was the easiest way of
awakening the public conscience and consciousness against the
exploitation of the poor by the rich. Moreover, Dickens chose
the field that he knew. He did not step out of his chosen field.
He knew the life of poor little children very well since he had
seen it. That is why his characters of this sphere are convincingly
interesting. We forget the element of exaggeration that some-
times creeps in their delineation. We know that the author
is talking on behalf of little children that love to see everything
in unique proportions.

Q. 62. Write a note on the principal novels of William
Makepeace Thackeray (1811-63).

Ans. W. M. Thackeray began his literary career by making
contribution to periodicals and magazines. Among his works
of fiction, the first significant achievement is Barry Lyndon (1884).
It is a picaresque novel recounting in a vivid and flashing style
tbe^adventures of Barry Lyndon, a gambler, a drunkard, and a
cheat. Barry Lyndon is an Irish adventurer of the eighteenth
century.

The story has been narrated by Barry himself in the absolute
fauh that he has always been right, though every word that falls
from his lips condemns him. “It is a superb mock heroic in
defence of gambling which stands in the same relation to
Thackeray’s other works as does Jonathan Wilde to Fielding”*
Vanity Fair (1847—1848)

The first great novel of Thackeray that atonce brought him
into prominence was 'Vanity Fair, a novel without a hero* In
this great work the artist presented realistically and graphically
the life of the people of the upper middle classes round about the
period of the Napoleonic wars ending in the battle of Waterloo.

^ R. W. Church : Development of the English Novel.

( 251 )

The picture of the civilians in Brussels is presented with clear-
sighted realism and sparkling irony. The seamy side of life with
its ruts, rags and uncleanliness finds its best expression in this
novel. In Thackeray’s own words we come across in Vanity
Fair *‘a set of people living without God in the world, greedy,
pompous men perfectly well satisfied for the most part and at
ease about their superior nature/’ Vanity Fair is, in fact, a
novel of society. It may be called an epic like Tow /o/iej? of
English life in the days when the air was filled with the rattle of
sabres and the boom of guns on the battlefield of Waterloo.

This novel is formless without a logically connected plot.
Incidents hang loosely. The episodes and the incidents of
the novel centre round the activities of a few prominent characters
such as Becky Sharp, Amelia, Joseph Sedley, Rawdown, Crawley
and Dobbin.

The characters of this novel are mediocres. There is no
hero of the dimension of Henry Esmond. All the male characters
except Dobbin are wanting in heroic conduct. The charm of the
book lies in the portrayal of the character of Becky Sharp, an
extremely cunning and elever type of woman who knows how to
make her way in the world by all possible methods. It is the charac-
ter of Becky Sharp that gives to this novel its main significance.
Becky Sharp provides ‘ a study in instinctive trickery, inherent
duplicity and the supple energy of the eternal feminine— the
adventures who scandalized and conquered her world, invincible
in her defeats, insecure in her triumphs,”*

The charge of cynicism is brought against Thackeray, for
in this novel he belittles grand virtues by associating goodnes^; with
pettiness of character. Good people are represented a$ fools and
the palm is carried away by the vicious and the wicked. The
novelist gloats as he sings —

How very weak the very wise

How very small the very great are.

Not only is Thackeray cynical in Vanity Fair^ but he is also
a satirist. Vanity Fair is a satire on contemporary society exposing
the foibles and weaknesses of the people of his times.

Biana Ncill ; A History of the English Novel.

( 252 )

The style of Vanity Fair is flexible, trenchant and lively,
sometimes impassioned and nobly eloquent.

Pendennis (1848—50).

The second novel of Thackeray Pendennis is almost auto-
biographical in character presenting an account of the activities
of a young man, Pendennis, at school, at college, in the inn of
court and at the club. The picture of Pendennis is satirical.
Through the character of Pendennis the novelist presents the
pitfalls of a career devoted to the pursuit of selfish ends. Pendennis
is the embodiment of selfishness. ^^Pendennis is a profound moral
study and the most powerful arraignment of well-meaning selfish-
ness in our literature not even excepting George Eliot’s Romola
which it suggests.'’

Henry Esmond (1852—1853).

Henry Esmond is a great historical novel dealing with the
reigns of William III (1689—1702) and Queen Anne (1702—1714).
Thackeray had been in love with the 18th century as can be seen
from his book English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century,
This love for eighteenth century lite is reflected in Henry Esmond
and Thackeray successfully reconstructs the life lived in the reign
of Queen Anne with all the glamour of literary brilliance moving
round about Addison and Steele who figure prominently in
the novel.

The chief merit of Henry Esmond lies in its plot construc-
tion and coherence. It is the only novel of Thackeray in which
there is little formlessness and looseness of plot construction. **A11
other of his novels are broken, interrupted and meandering in their
narrative” says Hugh Walker, ‘*but Esmond is one of the most
perfectly constructed stories in English language. It has no
intricate plot and its unity from beginning to end, the harmony of
the tone, the systematic progress of the narrative^ strikes every
reader.”

In the sphere of characterisation Thackeray achieves signal
success. The characters of Henry Esmond, Lady Castlewood,
Beatrix, are mosterly portrayed. Henry Esmond is the Bayard of
English fiction. He is noble and gentle though he may appear to
be a prig to the readers. Beatrix is young and beautiful, coquettish

( 255 )

and sparkling, bent on making her way in the world. Lady
Ciastlewood is saintly and motherly.

The style of Henry Esmond is stately, lucid, and dignified.
The pictures of 18th century life are presented with vivid intensity
of feeling. ‘‘Perhaps on the whole Esmond is written with a more
iiustained excellence of style than any of his other books; and the
triumph seems all the greater when we bear in mind that this style
was not his own, but the imitated style of an age long past.”*
Newcomes ( 1853 - 1855 ).

The story of Newcomes which is told by Pendennis centres
round the character of Young Clive Newcome, a youngman of
noble and generous impulses. He is the son of Colonel Thomas
Newcome, an officer of the Indian Army in whom Thackeray has
drawn an admirable portrait of a simple minded gentleman guided
in his life by the principles of duty and honouc.

Newcomes is Thackeray’s* most pathetic novel. It dwells upon
pardon, renunciation, forgiveness, friendship and the separation
of parents and children by sea and death. In Newcomes Thackeray’s
aim was to portray great and commanding goodness of heart in
characters like Ethel and Colonel Newcomes in contrast to the
cunning and shifty characters of the first two novels.

"Newcomes is a novel of sentiment or feeling possessing
the finer spirit of Sterne. The death bed scene of Colonel Newcome
in this novel is highly pathetic and the words of the colonel in the
dress of the poor Greyfriars, are truly touching. Adsum has
passed into the language of devotional sentimentality.”

Virginians (Nov. 1857 to Sept. 1859).

In the Virginians the author relates the fortunes of the
descendants of Colonel Henry Esmond, in particular of his two
sons George and Henry and daughter Rachel.

The Virginians like Henry Esmond is a historical novel. It
represents the life of the 18th century. It is marked with a note
of sentiment and possesses the finer spirit of Sterne. The element
of satire which had played such an important part in Vanity Fair
becomes conspicuous by its absence in this work. Thackeray
now centres his attention not on finding faults but in comm-

Hugh alker : The Literature of the Victorian Era.

( 254 )

ending good virtues of ^head and heart in characters like
Harry Warrington.

The Virginians is formless and lacks unity. It is less a novel
and more a discursive work interspersed with anecdotes and
with experiments in the art of literary imitation. It is a work of
patches and not an organic whole. The main charm of the novel
lies in some half a dozen scenes of vivid drama. The best scene in
the book is that in which Harry Warrington visits the home of his
ancestors. Never has the sentiment of the returned traveller
been so finely caught in fiction as Thackeray does in the repres-
entation of Warrington’s reaction as he returns to his home. The
setting of the novel is admirable and the fine dialogues through
which characters arc represented do credit to the author.

Q. 63. Give your estimate of Thackeray as a Novelist
throwing light on (he various aspects of his art.

Ans. The Victorian Age is essentially the age of the novel
Some of the most gifted novelists of England — Dickens, Thackeray
George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte. Mrs. Gaskell, Trollope — flouris-
hed during this period and enriched English literature by their
vast literary output. Thackeray belonged to the early Victorians
and his name is closely associated with that of his contemporary
Dickens with whom he differed in many important respects.
Thackeray chose to follow in the foot-steps of Fielding. From
Fielding he borrowed not only his conception of plot construction
but also his satiric portraiture of society in a manner extremely
unflattering to the public.

Plot Construefion— As a novelist Thackeray did not very
much care for plot construction. In Thackeray’s novels there is
the absence of a coherent and unified plot. Most of his novels
are rambling in their discourse and are very loosely constructed.
Except for Henry Esmond the rest of Thackeray’s novels are
discursive and formless. Lord David Cecil is of the opinion that
Thackeray ‘*is a very uncertain craftsman. His hold on structure
is very slack, he does not bother to weave the different strands
of his theme together; loose ends dangle in the air, no careful
revision has cut out the tufts of unnecessary material tliat have

( 255 )

accumulated during the hurry of first writing’" This formless-
ness in Thackeray"s plot construction was due to two reasons.
First, daring his times, the serial system of publication was in
vogue which encouraged a want of coherence and looseness of
construction. The early novels of Thackeray had been contributed
to magazines and naturally they lacked that coherence which
would have come if the novelist had penned them systematically
for a whole novel. Secondly, Thackeray like Fielding had the
habit giving sermons and preachings, and he often intruded his
personality as a moraliser and a preacher. The tedious moralising
marred the unity and continuity of the plot. Though Thackeray
had no definite system of philosophy like George Eliot which ho
wished to propound through his novels, yet the sudden and
occasional popping up of the novelist disturbed the unity of the
story and brought formlessness to the novel.

Thackeray’s method of telling his story is an extension of
Fielding. Fielding inaugurated the method of telling story
in a leisurely manner sitting on his arm-chair. Lord David
Cecil says, ^‘However varied the vicissitudes through which the
story moves, it is told by the same voice, with the same tricks
of speech ; however different the characters and scenes he is
drawing, they bear the signature of Thackeray’ > style of
craftsmanship.”

*‘The second distinguishing mark of Thackeray’s method of
presentation is the mood in which he writes. Told as they are
openly in his person, the scenes of the story are inevitably steeped
in the mood in which he regarded life in general and then in
particular. The plain positive colours of the drama are refracted
through the painted glass of Thackeray’s mood. We see Sir Pitt
C-rawley’s death, for instance, partly as a matter of grief as it
seemed to Sir, Pitt partly as a matter for coftgrtaulation as it
seemed to his their, but predominantly as a matter for sardonic
irony as it seemed to Thackeray,”

Irony plays a significant part in Thackeray’s narration.
Irony is the key-note of Thackeray’s attitude towards life.
Thackeray can be dramatic and pathetic and comic and didactic,
pathos, drama, comedy and preaching alike are streaked with
^he same irony. ^‘Thackerayan irony, owing something sentimental

( 256 )

in it to Sterne, something virile to Fielding, is essentially ualikt
either, warm, lazy, powerful, the irony of the elderly, experienced
men surveying from his arm-chair in the evening of his days long
memories of Vanity Fain'*

Characters — The characters of Thackeray’s novels, parti-
cularly the characters of the early novels, are not of a very high
order of excellence like that of George Eliot. He could not paint
heroes in the sense in which Carlyle portrayed them. He achieved
eminent success not in the presentation of heroes of noble and
dignified characters, but in presenting adventures, cheats, sycho-
phants and fools. His understanding of life in the seamy side
was deep and he presented characters from that life with great
hdelity. “I will not paint for you angels or imps,” be wrote,
“because 1 do not see them, the young man of the day whom J
do see and of whom I know the inside and the out thoroughly,
him I have painted for you and here he is, whether you like
or not”

The characters of Thackeray are generally drawn not from
the poor section of our community but £r 'm the high social circle.
Dickens succeeded in presenting characters in whom simplicity,
and devotion wert personified. Thackeray could provide characters
in whom snobbery, hypocrisy, false glitter had their fullest play.
Though he excelled in the presentation of such characters, yet
in his latter novels he made a definite improvement in his art
and produced noble, good and great characters like Henry
Esmond, Lady (^astlewood. Colonel Newcomes, Henry
Warrington etc.

David Cecil is of the view that Thackeray repeats his charac-
ters again and again, “His virtuous heroines. Amelia Sedley,
Helen Pendennis, Lady Castlewood are the same people in diflFerent
costumes. And not his virtuous heroines alone : all his chief
characters can be grouped into a few categories.” This statement
cannot be accepted for there is a world of difference between
Amelia and Lady Castlewood, Becky Sharp and iBeatrix.

Another charge levelled against Thackeray’s character-
isation is that he painted only mediocre characters and was the
apostle of mediocrity. This charge has been sqaately met by
Hugh Walker in the ^Literature of the Victorian Era/ He

( 257 )

says, "Thackeray was csseatially a preacher and the substance of
all his sermons is, cease to be content with mediocrity, intellectual
or moral, learning its weakness, its worthlessness, its powerless-
ness for good, its fatal potency for evil Thackeray presented the
pictures of the four Georges who were mediocre men, but his
object was to show, “how benumbing, how degrading, how deadly
mediocrity is.*

Comparing Thackeray’s art of characterisation with that of
Dickens Lord David Cecil says, ‘Dickens is interested in indivi-
duality. His great figures live in virtue of the characteristics in
which they differ from their fellows. Thackeray’s are equally
alive; but they live in virtue of the characteristics they share. Nor
arc these, as with Scott, say, the cpmmon characteristics of a
group. Thackeray is interested not in the variety, but in the
species; not in men, but in man. His best characters do not play
secondary roles in the story-like Mr. Gamp or Dandie Dinmont;
each has its necessary contribution to make towards the
total impression,” “Thackeray was showing individuals and not
types." (Church).

Thackeray's characterisation of women was considerably
hedged by the limitations of his age. The Victorians were stern
Tiioralists and viewed with disfavour any sexual aberration or
representation of hot-blooded passion. That explains why
Thackeray’s women are cold and, inspite of their heart bubbling
with passion, as in the case of Beatrix, appear to be stone
old.

\s a Realist — Thackeray restored to English fiction a
sober actuality and stolid realism which it had lacked and missed
for many years. Though Dickens lulled us by the familiarity
of his settings into the belief that he was a realist, yet his
realism lay on the surface only and his pictures of London life
were magnificent pieces of idealised descriptions, sometimes as
fantastic as a passage from Notre Dame* Thackeray stood
against the illusory semblance of realism. “His principle,” says
Cross, “was that he must accept the world as he found it." It
was his object to represent life or a certain phase of it as truly
as it was ‘^not irradiated by the glow of romance nor brightened

‘ Hugh Walker: The Literature of the Victoriao Era.

( 258 )

by the rosy spectacles of sentiments.’^ Thackeray painted rcalis-
tically the life he knew. He himself said, have no brains above
my eyes ; I describe what I see.” His pictures of life, particularly
in the seamy side are accurate and true. Contrasting the realism
of Dickens and Thackeray, Lord David Cecil makes the pregnant
observation in the Early Victorian Novelists — "Dickens's ima-
gination is a distorting glass turning to grotesque comedy oi
grotesque terror the world that it reflects ; Thackeray’s is a kaleid-
oscope, shaking the coloured fragments of his observation into
a symmetrical order, round the centre of a common canon of
conduct.” The realism of Thackeray is very much different from
that of Zola and the French Naturalists. "He does not attempt
to reproduce with a photograhic accuracy all the facts, important
and unimportant, that make up the surface of any scene like
Zola. He sedulously selects from those he thinks the most
significant. And even these he does not represent with the
unemphasised plainness of Trollope, In the visible as much as
in the moral world he accentuates the traits which in his view
give his model its individuality, heighten the light, darken
the shadows.”*

In the Vanity Fair a complete picture of real life has been
presented with great art. In order to appreciate the realism of
his work one has to understand all the customs that were prevelant
in those days. Lord David Cecil says, "The world that meets
us in them was once the great humming, bustling, contemporary
world we feel : but it is so no longer. Its hum is dwindled to a
murmur, soon it will have subsided into final silence.”

As a Satirise — Thackeray, the realist, could not help being
a satirist. A realist is often a satirist as was Benjonson in the
Elizabethan days. Thackeray employed satire for castigating
the foibles of his times. Of all the satirists, Thackeray, after
Swift, was the most gloomy. Even his countrymen have reproa-
ched ^him for depicting the world uglier than it was. In the
Book of Snobsy the frailties of life in the upper classes of
people arc satirised mercilessly. In the Vanity Fair the tone of
satire assumes fierceness, very much like that of Smollett.

As a Cynic — Since Thackeray chose to be a satirist and a
* Lord D^id Cecil i Lari> ViciotIid Novelists.

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rabid castigator of the follies of human beings, he has been
considered as a cynic. He depicted adventurers, sychophants
with a glamour that betokened a perverted sense of human follies
and brought the charge of cynicism on the author. Since some
of his pictures of humanity were denuded of all virtues, it was
assumed by his readers that he was a cynic having no regard for
virtuous courses of life.

The fact is that Thackeray was no cynic. On the contrary
he had a profound faith in the essential goodness of things and
noble virtues as can be seen from the New Comes and Virginian^.
Trollope says, ‘‘He was one of the most soft-hearted of human
beings, sweet as charity itself, who went about the world dropping
pearls, doing good, and never wilfully inflicting a wound.”* He
was full of charity, and “to give some immediate pleasurc a
sovereign to a school boy, gloves to a girl, dinner to a man, a
compliment to a woman-was the great delight of his life.” The
charge of cynicism, therefore, cannot stand against Thackeray.
In this conuection the remarks of Hugh Walker are apt. He
says, “It is sufficient to appeal against the charge of cynicism to
Esmond and to the Round About Papers and to ask what cynic
ever conceived such a scene as the deathbed of colonel Newcome,
or such a character as that of the man there passing to his account.
To the true cynic human nature is not merely faulty but essenti-
ally mean; and a man who held such creed could have never
drawn such a character as Colonel Esmond, the Biyard of English
fiction.”

As a Moralist — Besides being a realist and a satirist,
Thackeray was also a moralist. “He is not content, like
Shakespeare, to be simply an artist, to tell an artistic talc and let
it speak its own message ; he must explain and emphasize the
moral significance of his work. There is no need to consult our
own conscience over the actions of Thackeray's characters, the
beauty of virtue and the ugliness of vice is evident on every
page.”

'Thackeray’s method of preaching was satirical and he was
far more a profound, moralist than Dickens. His moral sense
neves allowed the triumph of wicked characters. Perhaps that was

* Anthony Trollohe : W. M, Thackeray.

( 260 )

the Victorian influence on Thackeray’s art. He could not allow
Beckey Sharp to be triumpant at the end because that would have
shocked the Victorian conscience. All the conquests of the dasszl-
ling Beatrix lead only to an anrespected age and a miserable
death-bed in the end.

Sometimes Thackeray went out of his way to preach his
morals. He disturbed the progress of the story, intruding his
personality by some moral in his pocket to be given out without
much demur to whosoever needed it. This sermonizing tone of
his novels may not be appealing to the readers, but Thackeray
could not help being a moralist and making his purpose clearly felt
by his readers.

Thackeray and His Age— Lord David Cecil in The Early
Victorian Novelists has shown at length that Thackeray’s art as a
novelist was considerably influenced by the conditions of his age.
Mis genius was not in line with the thought of his age, but being
a Victorian he was constrained to follow the Victorian ideals. He
was, in fact, born at a wrong time. The Victorian insistence on
morality; particularly in sex, spoiled Thackeray’s portrayal of
women particularly in their sex-life. He was inhibited where the
portrayal of women or sex was concerned. The Victorian insis-
tence that a man was either wholly good or wholly bad exercised
its baneful influence on Thackeray’s portraiture of man. Even
in his worst sinners he saw glimpses of virtue. But conditioned
by his age he could not present virtues in his vicious characters.
That explains the complexity of the character of Becky Sharp.
Thackeray wanted to import virtues to her and he did it at places.
But ultimately the moral obsession and one-sided presentation of
character cither in its goodness or evil» came up before his eyes,
and he spoilt the character of Becky by making her sinful at the
end, so much so that she was led on to murder Joseph Sedley.
All this was done under the influence of the age.

Diana Neill has beautifully touched the relation of Thackeray
with his age and its impact on his art — ^‘His weaknesses spring from
the limitations imposed on him by the age in which he lived and
from which he consciously suffered. His insight into the work-
ings of human nature was profound, and its full expression
required an atmosphere of freedom. But this freedoxn was

( 261 )

precisely what he lacked and, in consequence, a conflict
developed between Thackeray’s creative inspiration and
the Victorian Age. The Victorian Age triumphed, with
the result that the novelist was compelled to be false to
his own genius. Thackeray’s artistic perception of characters
and situations was, within his range, infallible, but the power
to set down what he saw was cramped by a somewhat pharisiacal
moral code. That he submitted so readily to his age is the
measure of his weakness.”* There is much truth in Cecil’s
observation, ^*In the midst of Thackeray’s subtlest melody,
his richest passage of orchestration, there jars on our ears,
faintly, a false note.” “He was false to his central creative
inspiration.”

His Style — Thackeray has often been praised for his style
in his novels, and for many purple passages of exquisite beauty.
His style is graphic and at various times eloquent. Saintsbury
remarks that “there is no phrase in English so nervous, so fiutt-
eringly alive, as Thackeray’s.” His style is extremely conver-
sational, and even at its highest pitches it always seems to be
addressed to a listener, rather than to be composed without
reference to reading or hearing at ail. There is no sense of
turgidness in him, and his words seem to flow from his pen with-
out any effort, like snow-water upon the mountain side. “He
could no more restrain the current of his prose,” says Charles
Whibley, “than a gentle slope could turn a rivulet back upon
its course. His sentences dash one over the other in an often
aimless succession, as though impelled by a force independent
of their author.”** But he possessed no economy of speech, and
he never used one word if a page and a half could adequately
express the meaning. At times Thackeray is guilty of inaccuracies
and solecisms; but whenever he wanted, he could write with
prefect ^irtistry, lucidity, ease and artlessness as in Henry Esmond
and the Virginians* In this respect Burton remarks, “Thackeray
had the effect of writing like a cultivated gentleman not self-
consciously making literature. He was tolerant of colloquial
concessions that never lapsed into vulgarity, even his slips and

* Diaoa Neill ; Eoglish Novel.

* Charles Whibley : W. M. lhackeray.

( 262 )

sloyenliaess are those of the well heed. Thackeray has flexibi-
lity, music, felicity and deceptive ease. He had too the flashing
strokes, the inspirational sallies which characterise the style of
writers like Lamb, Stevenson and Meredith.'^

Q. 64. Give a brief account of the contribution made
by the novelists of the school of Charles Dickens anl William
Makepeace Thackeray.

Anr. The mighty shadows of Dickens and Thackeray fell
across the whole novel terrain. The example set up in the field of
fiction was followed by a host of novelists, the chief of them
being Charles Kingsley, Mrs. Gaskell, Charles Reade, Wilkie
Collins, George Borrow and Anthony Trollope. All the novelist;
save Anthony Trollope belong to the school of Dickens. Only
Trollope is a close follower of Thackeray. Wc will now briefly
describe their contribution to the Victorian novel.

CFiarles Kingsley (1819—75)

The main works of Charles Kingsley can broadly be divided
into three classes. In the first group we can place his social studies
and problem novels such as Alton Locke and Yeast. These two
social sermons are red-hot ingots hissing with passion and indig*
nation. In Alton Locke, he exposes the conditions in the
sweated tailoring trade. The hero of this novel is a London tailor
and poet. Yeast deals with the problems of agricultural
labourers and game laws after the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846.
The novel exposes the weaknesses of Victorian agriculture through
dialogues between the hero and various other characters. In the
second class fall his historical novels, Hereward the Wake,
Hypatia and Westward Ho. In Hereward the Wake, the novelist
'provides an account of Hereward the Wake, who was an
outlaw, and possessed bravery and courage. In the earlier
part of the book are given an account of his youth, his out-
lawry for robbing a monastery and his numerous exploits in
England anid FUnders. This novel is adventurous in tone and
is free from anticatholic sentiment. Hypatia ox New Foes with an
Old Face is a dramatic story of Christianity in oontant with
paganism, having its scene laid in Alexandria at tbe^ beginning of

( 263 )

the fifth century. In this >^ork he opposed Roman Catholicism,
and tried to check the movement towards Rome. ♦•Kingsley’s
hysterics against Romanism are now gay comedy, giving
a pleasing relish to Hypatia. It is a beautiful lament over the
passing of the gods.” Westward Ho is a patriotic tale of adven-
ture and naval enterprise during the times of Queen Elizabeth.
It is a highly idealized picture of the Elizabethan sea rovers.
The author’s hatred for Jusuits and Roman Catholics is again
voiced in this tale of adventure and national glory. The tale is
replete with exciting scenes and moves with a buoyant zest reflect-
ing with romantic exuberance the spirit of the early sea-rovers,
Hawkins and Drake.

In the third group, are placed Kingsley’s miscellaneous
works such as Water Babies^ a fascinating story of a
chimney sweep, which mothers read to their children at bedtime, —
to the great delight of the round eyed little listeners under the
counterpane.

Lovett Hughes makes significant observations about
Kingsley; ♦♦Kingsley is an important figure in English fiction
because he represents ideals which were powerful in England
between 1848 and 1870. He was the popular expounder of the
doctrine of Carlyle, whose name appears frequently in his pages,
and the spokesman for the Broad Church Muscular Christianity
and Christian Socialism. Kingsley lacked a sense of humour,
^and his efforts to be funny failed painfully. He had, however,
genuine imagination, axid presented some scenes, such as that in
which Hypatia was slain by the Christian mob of Alexandria at
the altar of the great Basilica, with a vigour which has made
them deservedly famous.” He is a capital writer for boys and is
best enjoyed in the uncritical days of youth. His work clearly
reveals two characteristics viz his anti-Catholic sentiment and his
zeal for reform,

♦♦To the development of the Novel as such kingsley contri-
buted little; he applied it so social and economic problems, to be
sure, but others had done that before him. It is even doubtful
that his novels had any important influence on the breakdown of
structure so often apparent in later novels of ideas. But certainly

( :m )

they themselves prefigure it.”*

Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-65).

The novels of Mrs. Gaskell can broadly be divided into
two classes. In the first group we place her novels dealing with
industrial and social life of the times. To this clase belong
Mary Barton^ Tale of Manchester Life and North and South. In
Mary Bartony she provides a realistic picture of the hardships
and difficulties faced by labourers in the wake of the industrial
Revolution. The work exhibits Mrs. GaskelTs first-hand acquain-
tance with the miserable and unhappy lot of labourers in
industrial towns like Manchester. It is weik in plot, but is
carried forward by the strength of its passionate sympathy with
the downtrodden. Here Mrs. Gaskell appears as a follower ot
Dickens and the humanitarian note in this novel is well pronoun-
ced. North and South is also based on a similar theme. Its plot
is better constructed. The tone of sympathy characterises this
work.

To the second group belong Cranfordy Ruthy Wives and
Daughters and Sylvia*s Lovers. Of these novels Cranford is
undoubtedly her best work. It is a classic. ‘‘Here is described
the old-style etiquette, the genteel poverty, the formal calls, and
evening parties, of a village wholly in the possession of the
Amazons, widows and spinsters, where no men are tolerated, except
the country doctor, who is allowed to stay there occasionally
overnight when on his long circuit. Old minds spend their time
in tea-drinking and stale gossip, and in chasing sunbeams from
their carpets.”** “The sympathy, the keen observation, and the
gentle humour with which the small affairs of a country village
are described make Cranford one of the most delightful stories in
the English language.”t

Ruth is ethical and psychological in character. The under-
lying doctrine of this work is stated by Mrs. Gaskell — “All
deeds however hidden and long passed by have their eternal
consequences.” Ruth announces the approach of the psychologi-
cal novel which later on was perfected by George Eliot. Mrs.

* Wagenkoecht: Cavalcade of the English Novel.

* * Cross : Development of the English Novel,
t W. J. Long ; English Literature*

( 265 )

Gaskell could not be a successful psychological novelist. “Mrs
Gaskell did not possess the clearness of vision, the equipment of
knowledge, and the breadth of horizon requisite for completely
satisfying this definition of the psychological novel. What she
did in part was fully accomplished by George Eliot.*’ (Cross).

Wives and Daughters is an ironical study of snobbishness.
It is remarkable for certain female portraiture;; such as Mrs.
Gibson, and Cynthia Kirk Patrick.

Sylvia’s Lovers is a moralistic love story in a domestic
setting, with which scenes of wilder beauty and human violence
are well blended, but the novel is spoilt by its unsatisfactory and
rather melodramatic ending.”

The writings of Mrs. Gaskell combine something of the
delicate humour of Jane Austen with a moralistic intention not
unlike that of George Eliot, but she is far less in stature than
either. Her workmanship is too often uncertain, and her plots are
generally weak and not infrequently melodramatic. Often the
pathos, which she can handle with great effect, deteriorates into
sentimentality, while her aim as a moralist leads her into preach-
ing. Her style is simple, lucid, and unaffected, and at her best
she has a delicate grace and charm. Gerald De Witt Sanders
has beautifully summed up the contribution of Mrs. Gaskell
to Victorian fiction in the following words : —

“Her chief general contributions to literature were those
she made in the social novel and in the delineation of village life
and customs in Victorian England. Her chief particular contri-
butions were htr incomparable characterizations of spinsters and
doctors and servants, her excellent use of dialogue and dialect
and her sympathetic understanding of the views of English work-
ingmen. In the first of these she had no near rival in English
literature ; in the second she did much to add to a realistic
presentation of characters by giving a correct representation ot
their conversations; and in the last she set the mode of others
until in time men became recognized as human beings and not
as worthless chattels. To have done any one of these things would
have been to live, to have done all three, and to have done them
well, will ensure her a lasting place among the worthies of
Hnglish literary history.”

( 266 )

Charles Rea4e (1814—84)

Reade was a dramatist, a novelist and a journalist. <<He
recognised no barriers between the drama and the novel; writing
sometimes a play, and then turning it into a novel, and then
again reversing the process.”* His novels were modelled on
dramatic pattern, and he had always in his mind ^Hhe actors on
the stage, and the galleries applauding.” To one of his novels
he gave the sub-title, 'A Dramatic Tale," and referred to another
as a ‘Dramatic Story by Courtesy Novel.*

Reade used the novel for social reform, and followed
closely on the heel of his master Dickens. His first novel Peg
Woffington (1853) is a study of stage life from behind the scenes,
and from the artistic point of view, is condsidered by Cross as, ‘'the
most perfect novel as a whole.” It is never too late to Mend
X1856) exposes the brutalities of the English prison system. Hard
Cash (1863) is the author's most successful propagandist novel
and is designed to attack the abuses prevailing in lunatic asylums.
In Foul Play Reade exposed the practice of scuttling of ships in
order to obtain insurance money. A Terrible Temptation is a
study of social reforms and reformers. Christie Johnstone is “an
attack on hero-worship, a fashioniable cult of sham and humbug
gods estabished by the most arrant of shams and humbings.”
On the whole Reade was a social reformer and he used the novel
for humanitarian purposes. “He did not believe that fiction should
be written simply to please, but that it should contain matter for
instruction and edification.”**

Reade’s masterpiece is C/o/5/er and the Hearth (1861). It is
one of the finest historical novels, and reconstructs the life of the
people at the stirring period of the Renaissance. For writing this
work he had ‘to read not only volumes but book-shelves and libra-
ries." The fifteenth century life of Italy is presented in this novel.
“The novel is a scholar's endeavour to restore to the imagination
of the nineteenth century, the form and spirit of the fifteenth;
to portray the dawn of the Renaissance, when mediaevalism with
its asceticism and narrow outlook on life was just beginning to
give way to the human feelings; mighty passions of friendship,

' Cross : Dcvelopmeat of the Boglish Novel.

* * Cross ; Development of the English Novel

{ 267 )

devotion» love, and jealousy, such as we have in the most splendid
of Italian novel le.*'* The story of the novel centres round
Gerald and his adventures. It is a well-knit novel, and a story
better composed, better constructed or better related than the
Cloister and the Hearth, it would be difficult to find anywhere.
‘'It has small resemblance to George Eliots’ Romola, whose scene
is laid in Italy during the same period; but the two works may
be read in succession, as the efforts of two very difierent novelists
of the same period to restore the life of an age long
past/’**

"Why did Reade rise so far above his usual level in the
‘Cloister and the Hearth’ ? The answer is comparatively simple.
He got hold here of a great tragic theme, and it was a theme on
which he could feel deeply, for his own life had been cursed by
enforced bachelorhood. Furthermore, since he was now writing
of the past, he had a subject better adapted to his method of
elaborate documentation that many contemporary subjects could
be; and the material he worked with was vastly superior to the
kind of thing he ordinarily clipped from the daily press and pasted
into his scrap-books. For once he did not confine himself to the
dramatic method but filled in an elaborate back ground; for once
he used atmosphere freely. And for once he did not stop with
describing his characters from the outside but entered intimately
into all their joys and sorrows and set them forth on their own
terms.

George Borrow (1803—1881).

George Borrow was a minor novelist of the Victorian age. He
adopted the picaresque novel of Smollet, and used it deftly for his
purpose. *'He had the faculty of seizing upon, the picaresque
elements in the world about him. He had the ready instinct of
the discursive writer for what was dramatically telling.” He was
a romancer and perfected the novel of adventure in a telling style

His principal works are The Bibfe in Spain (1843), Lnvetif'ro
(1851), The R many Ray (1857), Wild Wales (1862). The Bible in
Spain recounts the adventures of Borrow in Spain from 1835 to

• Ibid.

* W.J. Long: English literatar.^.
t Wageoknecht : Cavalcads of the English Novel.

( 268 )

1840. He had gone as an agent of the Bible society* and this
book gives a vivid picture of the great disturbance that rose in
Spain as the result of ‘ the Carlist troubles. The vivid picture
that the author gives of Spain is unquestionably true and the
work is one of the best of English books of travel. It is autobio-
graphical in character.

Lavengro and Romany Rye are studies in gipsy life. In
reading these books we are inevitably reminded of Matthew
Arnold’s Scholar Gipsy, Lavengro in gipsy language means
^philologist’ and word-master. The author is Lavengro or
word-master. The story is frankly autobiographical. The Romany
Rye in gipsy language means Gipsy gentleman. It is again
autobiographical and the name ‘Romany Rye' was given to
Borrow in his youth by Ambrose Smith. In this book, as in
Lavengro, we have vivid descriptions of Sorrow’s wanderings
and adventures. Both these works are “fictional autobiography”,
and the interest of these novels lies in the episodes and adven-
tures. “The style is odd. It has a Biblical directness and poetic
imagery. It can be as bald as the narrative style of Defoe. It
can flare up into a most powerful prose, as in the account of the
fight with the flaming Tinman in the dell. He commands
attention and even enthusiasm, and may be called the father of
a school of a semi-fictional writers.”*

“His books are remarkable in that they seriously pretend
to tell the actual facts of the author's life, but how much is fact
and how much is fiction will never be accurately known, so great
is his power of imagination. Taken as mere fiction, the books
exert a strong and strange fascination on many readers. They
have a naive sjmplicity resembling that of Goldsmith, a wry
humour, and a quick and natural shrewdness. As a blend of
fact and fiction, of hard detail and misty imagination, of sly
humour and stockish solemnity, the books stand apart in
our literature.”

Richard D. Blackmore (1825—1900).

He was the author of Lorna Doone (1869), The Maid of
Sker (1872), Cripps the Carrier (1876). Of these novels the most
popular is Lorna Doone. “The scene of this fasinacting romance

* R. W. Church « The Growth of the Eoglish Novel.

( 269 )

is laid in Exmoor in the seventeenth century. The story abounds
in romantic scenes and incidents; its descriptions of natural
scenery are unsurpassed; the rhythmic language is at times almost
e^ual to poetry; and the whole tone of the book is wholesome
and refreshing. Altogether it would be hard to find a more
delightful romance in any language, and it well deserves the place
it has won as one of the classics of our literature.”^

William Wilkie Collins (1823—1839).

Wilkie Collins is the close follower of Charles Dickens in
humour and whimsicality though he did not aim at social reform.
He wrote novels in which supernaturalism, sensationalism and
mystery played notable part. He provided in his The Dead
Secret (1857), The Women in White (1850), ho Name (1862), The
Moonstone (1868) matter for mystery and supernaturalism. He
introduced the old Gothic material, and added the note of
detection to the novel. He adopted the epistolary form popularised
by Richarson and paved the way for the detective novels of Conan
Doyle. These novels are full of jerks and jolts particularly when
the reader is asked to transmit himself from the point of view of
one character in the book to another. But the technical skill of the
novelist in plot construction is always at the highest pacticularly
in The Moonstone, where all tbe parts fit into one another with
the neatness of those puzzled pictures that were at once the
agony and delight of our childhood. There is not a scene which
docs not cany forward the tale, not a character that has not to
play a vital part in the solution of the mystery. The atmosphere
is charged with a haunting sense of mystery and fear. ‘Certainly
it would be difficult to overpraise the ingenuity of this book; it
has enough stuff in it for a dozen mystery stories as they go
now a days.*

“Collins! is skilful narrator. He has a love for story
telling rather than for creating great characters. Hardy said
of him, “He probably stands first, in England, as a constructor
of novels of complicated action that depend for their interest on
the incidents themselves and not on charactor.”

Collins’s main gift lies in creating atmosphere in his novels.
They arc as remarkable for their plots as for their atmosphere.
' J* tong : BogUsb Literature.

( 270 ;

**It is on atmosphere that he relies for the thrills and chills'’
says Wagenknecht ‘‘which Reade gets through violent action.
There is comparatively little action in his books.”*

‘^C^llins specialised in the mystery novel, to which he
sometimes added a spice of the supernatural. In many of his books
the story which often ingeniously complicated, is unfolded by
letters or the narratives of persons actually engaged in the events.
To a certain extent this method is cumbersome, but it allowed
Collins to draw his characters with much wealth of detail. His
characters are often described in the Dickensian manner of empha-
sising some humour or peculiarity.”

Wilkie Collins exercised a great influence on subsequent
novelists. A whole school of sensationalists was indebted to him.
Among those who were deeply influenced by Collins’s art were
Marie Corelli and Hall Caine, to say nothing of writers of con-
temporary mystery and detective stories. On a higher level he
influenced Blackmoce, Meredith, Hardy, Stevenson, Conrad and
Arnold Bennett.

Anthony Trollope (1815-62).

Anthony Trollope is the only novelist who adopted the
method and art ot Thackeray. He can be regarded as a son or
Thackeray without his father’s genius.

“Trollope was a minute observer of life, and regarded the
novel as a salutary and agreeable sermon preached to recommend
the virtues and to discountenance the vices.”**

Trollope’s fame as a novelist rests on his Barsetshire noveK
dealing with the imaginary country of Barsetshire and particularly
in the ecclesiastical centre, Barchester. Trollope was particularly
interested in the life of bishops and clergymen and his famous
novel Barchester Towers (1857) is a close and faithful study ot
life in a cathedral town and “is remarkable for its minute picture
of bishops and clergymen, with their families and dependents/’
This novel ought to be read together with The Warden (1855)
and The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867), and other novels of the
same series because in all of them the scenes and characters
the same and repeated with mechanical rcgulr^*^-

* Wageokoeeht ; Cavalcade of the English /Novel.

* * Cross : The Development of the English Novel,

( 271 )

arc the best expressions of Ttollope^s genius. His other impor-
tant works are Doctor Thorne (1828), Framley Passonge
(1861), The Small House at Allingtoo (1864), Phineas Redux (1874).

"Trollope is a novelist of the middle and upper middle
classes. With urbane familiarity and shrewd observation he pre-
sents an accurate, detailed picture of their quiet, uneventful lives in
matter-of-fact way which gives his work the appearance ot
chronicles of real life. His main concern is with characters rather
than plot, but his characters, though clearly visualized and descri-
bed in great detail, lack depth, and Trollope never handles the
profounder passions. The frame work of his novel is a series of
parallel stories moving with the leisureliness of every day life.
His style, efficiently direct, simple, and lucid, is seen to a parti-
cular advantage in hi$ dialogue. A vein of easy satire runs through
many of his novels and he makes skilful use of pathos. Within
limited scope he is a careful craftsman who retains his
popularity.”

"For readers of to-day, Trollope’s limitations would
seem to be quite as valuable as his special powers. He was
pedestrian ; he was comfortably mid-Victorian. He was blind
to some of our great social problems ; others, through the
accident of time, he was lucky enough never to encounter. But
there are times when we are thankful to be able to turn to a
writer who helps us to forget these problems, and who reminds
us that the only ceaselessly interesting thing in the world is
human nature.”* To Paul Elmer More the novels of Trollope
seemed, "like an unfailing voice of encouragement in times of
joy and prosperity ; they have offorded solace in hours of
sickness and adversity ; they have lightened the tedium of idleness
and supplied refreshment after the fatigue of labour.”

Wageoknecht; Cavalcade of the Eoglish Novel.

Laler Ticlorian Noipelisls,

Q. 65. Give your estimate of Charlotte Bronte (1816-55)
as a novelist and comment on her principal works.

Ans. Charlotte Bronte was the eldest of the Bronte sisters
who romanticised English fiction during the Victoriin age. Instead
of dealing with the manners and ways of an artificial society, she
directed her attention to the inner working of the human soul,
and revealed the passionate cry of the human heart in her works.
She introduced poetry, passion and imagination in fiction and
made it a thing of beauty and charm. She harnessed in the service
of fiction the vitalising force of imagination and introduced the
finest graces of romanticism in her novels mostly grounded on
personal experiences of life.

Charlotte Bronte began her career as a poetess aad then
drifted on to the field of fiction. She wrote four novels in suc-
cession. Her fame rests on The Professor, Jane Eyre, Shirley
and Viilelte, ‘"There is emphatically a recurring pattern in
Charlotte’s literary carpet. As regards their matter ; Yorkshin
and Brussels, the governess, the tutor and the school are oftci
repeated, interwoven with the cleric and the millowner. In manne
a similar recurrence exists, for in all the novels except Shirdy^
the story is told in the first person. A deeper unity is achievee
by the consistent theme, this is always the conflict bctweci
high integrity and worldlincss."* The Professor, her immatur
work, was published after her death in 1857. In this novc
Charlotte Bronte focusses her attention on her impressions o
Brussels life. It is autobiographical in character and the mair
figures of the novel ace drawn from her personal acquaintance
The professor of the novel is William Crimsworth. He i? th-
narrator of the story. He recounts his life from the time h
quarrelled with his aristocratic uncles and became a professor it

Phyllis Bentley : The Brontes

( 273 )

Pelcts’ boys school. Here he developed love with his half Swiss,
half English pupil, Frances Evans Henri, and finally married her
though his love was sought to be disturbed by Zoraide. In this
novel. Heger, the lover of Charlotte, plays the part of the
professor, and her own role is carried out by Frances Evans
Henri.

This novel is realistic in character. At this stage Charlotte
was of the view that “her story should be as far removed from
the land of the Genii and as near to real life as it could possibly
be.” The realism of this novel was not appreciated. Charlotte
realised that it was not realism but romance that the people ot
her times were really after, and in her subsequent novels, she
produced works in which there was an overdose of romance,
thrilling incidents and wild adventures.

Jane Eyre marks a change from realism to romance. This
novel is undoubtedly the best of Charlotte’s works. It is frankly
autobiographical in character. It was first published under the
name of Currer Bell ; and the name of the author posed a
problem for the public. Was the writer ot the novel a man or a
woman ? It was later on revealed that it was a woman^s work,
fane Eyre is Charlotte Bronte herself and the novel sets forth
her experiences of life in a remarkably moving and touching
style. “It is a powerful and fascinating study of elemental love,
and hate, reminding us vaguely of one of M.irlowe’s tragedy.”* li
is a lyric poem, the kind of poem written only in adole-
scence when excess is all and restraint is felt to be a
self-betrayal.”**

In Jane Eyre there is a beautiful combination of realism and
romance. Jane Eyre’s life at Lawwood Asylum is a realistic
portrayal of her own life at Cawan Bride school. The later part
of the novel dealing with the experiences of Jane Eyre at
Thornfield Hall is saturated with the spirit of romanticism.
Thornfield Hall and Rochester are born of desire and imagination.
The characters of the novel are vigorously drawn, and we arc
particularly attracted by the characters of Rochester and Jane
Eyre.

^ W, J. Long : English 1 itgratuie.

R, W, Churgh : The Growth of the English Novel.

( 274 )

Shir/ey, the third novel of Charlotte Bronte, is marked with
a strong note of realism. To those who expected to find
romance in this work Charlotte gave the warning —“Calm
your expectations. Something real, cool and solid lies before
you, something unromantic as Monday morning.’^ The novel
deals with the efforts of Robert Gerald Moore, a millowner to
marry Shirley Keeldar, a young woman of wealth to tide over
the financial crisis that faced him in his industry. He is being
rejected by Shirley who senses his mercenary motives in marrying
her. Shirley marries Louis, Younger brother of Robert. In the
character of Shirley we find a full portrait of Emily Bronte,
younger sister of Charlotte Bronte.

In Shirley Charlotte wrote a novel in the somewhat
desultory style of reminiscences, “The writing never reaches the
emotional power, never makes the intense impression found in
Jane Eyre, and there are some missish dialogues and diatribes
which are frankly tedious.”* It is dull in comparison to Jane
Eyre.

Villette and Emma are the last fruits of Charlotte Bronte.
In ViUettet, Charlotte Bronte repeats the experiences of an English
girl Lucy Snowe in a school at Brussels. The matter 'had already
been used by her in The Professor, Parts of this book seem
protracted and laboured. It has the same feverish note that we
first meet in Jane Eyre with a less artificial resolution of the plot.
“As a work of art Vil etie is not altogether satisfactory. It
bristles with glaring improbabilities, is unequal in conception and
shows signs of inevitable emotional overstrain. Memories of
Mrs. Radcliffe and the Terror School are looked at every turn
and yet flashes of imaginative brilliance are revealed.”** Emma
deals with the personal experiences of Charlotte Bronte and lacks
the warmth and passion of Jane Eyre,

Having examined the main works of Charlotte Bronte
let us now evaluate her contribution to the English novel.

A novelist of inner life.

Charlotte Bronte broke a new ground in the history of
19tb century fiction. Instead of concentrating her attention on

* Phvllis Bentley ; The Brontes.

** Diana Neill ; A Short History of the Englhh NoveU

( 275 )

manners and ways of social life as had been donti by Jane Austen,
she attempted to probe the inner recesses of the heart and the
soul. She replaced the novel of manners by the novel of the
spirit. literature of manners was to give place to a literature
of the spirit in the novel of Charlotte Bronte.”* In her novels
the soul was revealed in its full glory. The soul was at last
awake to its own existence and its relation to a complex and
perhaps inscrutable universe.

A novelist of passion and intense life.

Charlotte Bronte wis essentially the novelist of passion and
storm. In her works we come across deep intensity and powerful
emotional onrush of thought and feelings. There is a quivering
sensibility that stirs us. Charlotte was dissatisfied with Jane
Austen’s passionless life and commenting upon her works she
once observed, "Jane Austen ruffles her reader by nothing
vehement, disturbs him by nothing profound. The passions arc
perfectly unknown to her; she rejects even a speaking acquain-
tance with that stormy sisterhood.” What she found lacking in
Jane Austen was supplied by her in her own works. "What
Charlotte Bronte is really concerned with in The Professor, Jane
Eyre and Villette is the one thing only, the depiction of the
isolated, naked soul responding to the experience of life with a
maximum of intensity. The pleasantness or otherwise of the
revelation is immaterial; the nakedness is everything. This
means that, different though her experience was from theirs, in
the last analysis Charlotte Bronte belongs to the same tiny group
of novelists as Dostovsky and Lawrence.”**

Limifed range of her novels.

As regards the panorama of life unfolded in her novels,
we have to observe that Charlotte Bronte does not provide a
diversified view of life. In her novels the vision of life is
restricted to the few experiences that she had of life at Brussels
ann Yorkshire. The same matter is repeated by her in Jane Eyre
and Villette. There is a family likeness, in all the novels of
Charlotte Bronte. "There is emphatically a recurring pattern in
Charlotte’s literary carpet. As regards their matter: Yorkshire

• E. A. Baker : I fie History of the English Novel.

• ' Walter Allen : The English Novel

( 276 )

* and Brussels, the governess, the tutor and the school arc often
repeated, interwoven with the cleric and the millowner. A
deeper unity is achieved by the consistent theme. There is aways
the conflict between high integrity and worldliness/**

Plot construction.

Charlotte Bronte does not have any cogency and coherence
in her stories. Her plots are rambling and discursive. “They
curve in and out, sometimes running, sometimes sauntering. She
was altogether clever but knew nothing systematically. It is this
logical faculty which makes Wuthering HeightSy inspite of all
defects, a more compact story than Jam Eyre^ Shirley or
Villette."**

Characterisation.

In the field of characterisation, Charlotte Bronte is inte-
rested in the study of woman and man as individuals^ and her
characters are drawn with dexterity and skill revealing the inner
recesses of her male and female characters. She presents a new
conception of heroine which differs from the conventional attitude
towards women. Her heroines, particularly Jane Eyre and
Shirley, are vigorous and active, energetic and full of verve and
zest for life. Among her male characters Rochester attracts
us most.

Her imaginative poetry and painting ability.

The novels of Charlotte Bronte are rich in poetic touchc^
and pictorial effects. Her descriptions cf natural scenery reveal
the hand of a poet and a painter. Scenes of tempest and storm
flash through her novels. “A special manifestation of this power
may be found in her descriptions in Jane Eyre of imaginary
pictures, which show that she had the spirit, though not the tech-
nical skill of the greatest of painters.^’f
Lack of humonr and over-seriousness.

In the novels of Charlotte Bronte one finds the lack of humour
and light hearted gaiety. She is always in earnest. “She has
no lightness of touch. She cannot believe that there are occasions
when a smile is more effective than a sermon and a zest more

* Phyllis Bentley ; The Brontes.

* Mi«s Marjory Bald : Women Writers oi the l9;h Century,
t Hugh Walker; The Literature of the Victorian Bra.

( 277 )

crushing than a blow. This lack of humour affords a ground
more grave than any other for doubting the permanence of her
tame. With few exceptions they whom the world has chosen to
remember have been gifted with it, but Milton is among the
exceptions,*'*

Coarseness in Charlotte^s novels.

It has been pointed out that Charlotte Bronte's novels are
coarse, rough and brutal. But the charge is not justified.
“She was unflinchingly sincere, and whatever of coarseness there
may be in her works came from her photographic fidelity to the
life she knew, and was no part of the fibre of her mind. Among
the men and women of her acquaintance it was the custom to
speak plainly and to call a spade a spade. The display of uncur-
bed passion was familiar to her, and hence she frequently
depicted her characters as saying words and doing deeds which to
some of her readers seemed unnece^sarily coarse, brutal and
cruel.”**

Lack of moral teaching.

In Charlotte Bronte’s novels there is little of preaching or
moral teaching. In this respect she differs from George Eliot
who was a moralist at heart. It is not possible to squee^^/C a
moral out of her productions. “To teach” she said, * is not my
vocation. What I am, it is useless to say. Those whom it con-
cerns feel and find it out. I cannot write a book for its moral.”
Her style.

Charlotte Bronte writes with the sensitivity of a poet. There
is something exquisite and unique in her phrases. To appreciate
her prose we have to read them together rather than in isolation
from the context. “Her best phrases are not exquisite when
.segregated. To appreciate them we must light upon them in the
midst of a printed page. To pull phrases is like pulling petals
a flower and exhibiting them as representatives of its beauty,
^’hilc the charm has evaporated and even the very fragrance is
diminishcd.”f

Hugh Walker : The Literatuie of the Victorian Era.

•Ibid.

t Mils Marjoiy Bald : Women Writers of the Nineteeotb Century.

( 278 )

Conclusion.

is not as thinket or poet or social reformer that
Charlotte Bronte should be judged. She is essentially a novelist
and as a novelist she merits the warmest praise. The fire of life
burns strongly in her works.”*

Q. 66. Give an estimate of Emily Bronte (1818-48) as a
novelist and write a note on her ‘Wuthering Heights.’

Ans. Emily Bronte, the younger sister of Charlotte Bronte,
was one of the prominent novelists of the nineteenth century. She
has been able to carve out for herself a place in the history of
English fiction by her one single novel Wuthering Heights.

n ily, Bronte was in every way sharper and bleaker than her two
sisters and she was of emotion all compact. She was a poetess
as well as a novelist but it is by her one single novel rather than
by a large number of her poems that she is known to the modern
readers. As a novelist Emily is known by Wutherin^ Heights. It
is a masterpiece of genius and has been the subject of ^‘many
ardent eulogies and appreciation almost poetic in their enth-
usiasm.”** It is an impersonal novel and stands in strong
contrast to the extreme subjectivity of Charlotte’s Jane Eyre.
^ is a work of art and is marked with fury and fire, deep emo-
tion, intense passion, strong hate and stormy feeling^ ^*It is a
work of stark grandeur in which a wholly non-o^ral world of
fierce symbolic action is localised quite precisely in the author
experience of Yorkshire life.” (^Emily presents in this novel ^
very powerful story of terror and revenge and the entire work is
enlivened by flashes of lyrical passion and emotional exuberance.
The novel fully justifies the opinion of Matthew Arnold that the
author’s soul.

Knew no fellow for mighty

Passion, vehemence, grief.

Daring, since Byron died.

In the words of Richard Church this novel is ^one of the
most odd and unplaceable works in the whole of English fictioO'

' Phyllis Bentley : The Brontes,

Lionel Stevenion : The Eogiish Novel, a Panorama*

( 279 )

It remains a lonely peak in the landscape of the English novel.”*
In the words of Moody- Lovett^ “This novel has gradually come
to be recognised as one ot the major imaginative creations of
the century. ’•**

The story is filtered through the minds of two
onlookers and the stirring incidents are being presented through
the mouth of Mr. Lockwood and Nelly Dean, the house-keeper
of Wuthering Heights. The story deals with HeathclifF, Cathy,
Mr. and Mrs. Earnshaw, Edgar Linton and it is a powerful
tale of revenge. The story tells us how Mr. and Mrs. Earnshaw,
owners of the farm house called Wuthering Heights, lived splen-
didly well with their two children, Hindley and Catherine. Another
family of the Lintons lived at a distance of four miles from the
Wuthering Heights. Mr. and Mrs. Linton had two children,
Edgar and Isabella. One day Mr. Earnshaw went to Liverpool
on a business trip and on his way back he brought with him a
homeless boy whom he had picked up on the street. Earnshaw
brought up this young brat and gave him the name of Heathclifl*.
This young boy began to grow in years and Catherine started
loving him a little though her brother Hindley had no liking for
HeathclifF. A few days after the arrival of HeathclifF to Wuthering
Heights, Mr. Earnshaw died leaving the charge of his property
to his son. Hindley, who degraded HeathclifF to the level of a
servant behaved rudely with the unsupported boy. Hindley
did not like the growing love between Catherine and Heath-
cliff and insisted that Catherine should marry Edgar Linton.
HeathclifF was deeply mortified at this insult heaped upon him by
Hindley and one day he quietly slipped away from the place only
to return three years later in a much better financial condition
than he had ever seen in his life. On his return to Wutheriog
Heights HeathclifF was welcomed by Hindley. Catherine, who
had married Edgar Linton in the absence of HeathclifF once again
revived her old love for HeathclifF. She was torn in a conflict and
died in agony giving birth to a daughter named Cathy. The
death of Catherine produced a feeling of deep resentment in the
heart of HeathclifF and he decided to take full revenge on

* Richard Church rThe Growth of ihe English Novel.

Moody**Lovect : A Htitory of English Literature.

( 280 )

Hindley who had stood in the way of his tnairiage with Catherine.
HeathclifF succeeded in ruining Hindley by enticing him in
gambling and drinking bouts. Hindley lost everything in gambling
to HeathclifF including Wuthering Heights. HeathclifF became
the master of Wuthering Heights. He ill-treated Hindley and his
son and reduced them to the position of labourers. He eloped
with Isabella Linton and hoped to acquire the entire property
of Lintons through his son Linton HeathclifF, born as . the result
of Heathcliff's life with Isabella Linton. HeathclifF managed to
acquire both the property of the Earnshaws and the Lintons. Ihs
plan of revenge was accomplished but he could not n^ke all
Lintons and Earnshaws wretched for Hindley's son Harton and
(.athy continued to love each other for the rest of their lives. In
the meantime HeathclifF died without seeing the complete
destruction of the houses of Earnshaws and Lintons.

This novel is “unique for its dark and thunderous atmos-
phere and its powerful fusion and inordinately passionate love
and hatred.'’* Though it centres upon an overmastering love,
it is devoid of sexual passion as well as moral
judgments. ULt only ‘displays the tragic action with fatalistic
imprcssivene5s.*0

The plot or the novel is a little confused “but the story
abounds in excitement and suspense which are skilfully heightened
by the peculiar and complex mode of narrative.”!

The characters of Wuthering Heights are elemental beings and
HeathclifF, Catherine and Edgar continue to hold us in their grip.
Emily Bronte “portrays, with absolute fidelity the weakness of the
Lintons, the appalling insensate hardness of HeathclifF, the egoism
of Cathy and the fatal consequences of all these qualities, yet she
views these characters as she does, the deer, the wolf and the
hare; that is, with regret for their defects, but with understanding
and compassion.”

This novel exhibits the full play of cruelty in human life*,
“The action is laid in hell.” says D.G. Rossetti, “only it seems that
places and people have English names there,” and hellish feeling

* Moody«LoveU— A History of English Llteraiure.

Lionel Sievensot.'^Ihe English Novle a Pacorasna,
t Phyllis Bentlry -Tte Bronte^,

( 281 )

is created particularly at the behaviour of Heathcliff towards his
victims. The reader feels stifled and choked. Throughout the
book the capacity of brute force seems magnified beyond endur-
ance. ‘‘Every beam of sunshine is poured down through thick
bars of threatening cloud, every page is surcharged with moral
electricity.”*

The deep eni^tional force of the entire novel shall be felt
by every reader. | Emotions portrayed in the novel have a terrible
force about them.^They are “wild as the north wind, dark as the
storm cloud and strong as the rock.’^

The fire of poetry burns through the pages of this powerful
work and the poetic touches emanating from the speeches of its
characters are “felt in the blood and felt along the heart.” The
following lines spoken by Heathcliff provide just a simple survey
of the rich poetry that runs throughout the novel. “I cannot look
down the floor, hut her features are shaped in the flags I In every
cloud, in every tree — filling the air at night, and caught in every
object by day— I am surrounded with her image. The entire world
is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist and chat
I have lost her.”

Wuthering Heights is rich in vivid portraits of nature
particularly of the Moorlands. As we read this novel we come
accoss dark rocks, tumbling blocks and wild wind, wailing and
raging over their heads. “The natural setting constantly colours
the Moors, the Moors through the changing seasons being
described with the poet’s observation and a poet’s sense of the
inevitable word.”** “We feel ourselves alone with earth in one
of her grand, wild and sombre manifestations.’-’f

The novel has a philosophic, moral and symbolic value of
its own. The end of Heathcliff exhibits the defeat of evil. Evil
is always self-doomed. The tempestuous passions of the characters
are thus tranquillised by being shown against the eternal back-
ground of nature’s impersonal processes.

Wuthering Heights is not so much a symbolic or a
philosophic novel as a novel of romanticism. Wuthering Heights^

Charlotte’s observatfoDs regarding •Wuihcring Heights*,

Lionel SteveD8oo-*The English Novel, a Panorama.

^byllisBeiitley«*<*lhe Brontes.

( 282

in shoft, is a masterpiece of romanticism. “Just as Jane

Austen had been an anachronistic eighteenth-century rationalist in
the romantic heydey, so Emily Bronte was an anachronistic
romantic visionary amid Victorian practicality.”*

Q. 67. Give a brief account of the main works of Anne
Bronte.

Ans. Anne Bronte was the youngest of the Bronte sisters.
Her main works are A^nes Grey and The Tenant of Wild fell Hall.

Agnes Gray is another governess story, a Jane Eyre
without its fire. It lacks both the melodramatic plot and the
passionate assertiveness of Charlotte’s novel. It has the familiar
Bronte scorn of insincerity, the Bronte condemnation of selfish,
vain, self-centred women, and the Bronte preoccupation with
love. The heroine is a governess who falls in love but is inarti-
culate with shyness. The hero is a good hearted curate who
understands the silent love of his beloved and rewards her for her
unexhibited love. The novel ends happily. In place of Charlotte’s
vehemence we have a quiet tone in the novel and the tedium
is relieved by touches of amiable humour.

The second novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hal! is an ambi-
tious attempt and holds the same relationship to Wuthering Heights
as her preceding one had to Jane Eyre. The novel is an interest-
ing study of a drunkard who meets his tragic end because of his
excessive addiction to drink. The portrait of the drunkard
Arthur Huntingdon is admirably drawn. Huntingdon presents
the portrait of Anne's brother who was actually killing himself
with alchohal and drugs. Agonised by the moral dissipation and
moral disintegration of her brother, Anne intended *‘her novel to
be a terrible warning against sin and self indulgence. The obvious
moril purpose and the author’s self-torture in writing the book
produced an effect that is painful rather than tragic.”**

* Lionel Steveoson— Ihe Eoglfsh Novell a Penorma*

•• Ibid.

( 283 )

Q. 68. What was the cantrib:ati')n mads by the Bronte
sisters to the English novel ?

Ans. The Bronte sisters— Charlotte, Emily, Anne— made
notable contribution to the English novel during the ninete.inth
century. They represent the ‘stormy sisterhood ' in English fiction,
and it was their effort to introduce the true spirit of romanticism
and emotionalism in fiction

“The Gothic novelists had rebelled against the ‘reasonable’
limitations of the eighteenth century, but they got bogged on the
terror tale and generally failed to go deep enough to make their
revolt completely effective. The Brontes had what the Gothic
people lacked ; they worked against the background of that va^t
spiritual awakening which we call the Romantic movement. In
the Brontes, the Romantic movement captured the English novel.
Deserting the drawing room and the town they drove to the
elemental things.”*

Instead of concentrating on the depiction of the manners
and customs of social life as wa<5 done by Jane Austen, they turned
their gaze to the inner spirit of their characters and presented in
their work the study of souls in distress and suffering. They had
the ruthless determination to dig down to the roots of the inner
life. They were not interested in the portrayal o^ social life as in
the laying bare of the hum in soul passing through all the trials
and tribulations of a chequered life. They chose to study the
feminine heart and presented the woman’s point of view in their
fiction. They presenced a new conception of the heroine as a women
of vital strength and passionate feelings. Jane Eyre, Shirley,
Agnes are fine studies of feminine life providing glimpses into the
workings of their souls.

The Bronte sisters had limited experience of life, but their
narrow and limited experience did not stand in ths way of their
achieving excellence in their work. Of course the repetition of
the same matter made their novels somewhat stale, but the dull-
ness was relieved by the presentation of. passion and emotion in
an intensified form. Charlotte Bronte and Anne Bronte had
experience of being governess, school teachers and pupils, and they
repeated the same scenes and experiences again and again in their

' Wagenknccht : The Cavalcade of the English Novel

.( 284 )

novels. Professor is enjoyable but the tepetition of the same
theme in Villette makes the book unintecesting. But what saves
the books from staleness is their emotional fervour and exube-
rance. They represent emotions and feelings in a picturesque
and convincing manner, and that sways the readers.

From the point of plot construction, the Bronte sisters
have not much to their credit. The plots of their novels are
complex and often formless, and in many cases there are dishevelled
and entangled episodes, but what they lose by way of story-telling,
they gain by their characterization. Their characters are elemen-
tal figures. We can neither forget the male nor the female
characters. Jane Eyre, Rochester, Shirley, HeathclifF, Catherine,
Agens impress us deeply. The characters are truthfully and
sincerely portrayed in all their vices and brutalities.

The Bronte sisters introduced the subject of passionate love
in their novels. They were novelists of passion, and often there
were scenes of intense passionate life. Charlotte has been compared
to George Sand in her presentation of passion in her novels.
Romanticism in its passionate aspect, which Sir Walter Scott had
missed in his novels, was introduced by the Bronte sisters. Emily
used the matter ot Gothic Romance to perfection and her fathering
Z/e/gA/j is "a belated masterpiece of romanticism. Just as Jane
Austen had been an anachronistic eighteenth century rationalist
in the romantic heyday, so Emily Bronte was an anachronistic
romantic visionary amid Victorian practicality.”*

Their novels are poetic and there are passages that almost
border on poetry. In their prose passages there is a gleam of poetic
fire. In Wuthering Heights, the reader will come across many
beautiful poetic passages that will move him to ecstasy and joy.

The most obvious contribution of the Bronte sisters was
the presentation of the life of Yorkshire and its rich spectacles of
nature. **They all present its landscape—Charlotte realistically,
Anne nostalgically, Emily fully, poetically and superbly. They
all use its rich rough dialect. They all present its people — though
they present them in different ways.”**

Lionel Stevenson— The English Novel* a Panorama.

** Phyllis Bentley— The Brontes.

( 285 )

Q. 69. Write a note on the main n3ve)s of George Eliot
(1819-1880).

An$. George Eliot was one of the prominent novelists of
the nineteenth century. She belonged to the Victorian Age but
was very much different from the early Victorian novelists. She
was an intellectual writer and like Meredith was interested in the
revelation of the inner life of her characters. Her preoccupation
was mainly in delving deep into the souls of her characters from
an intellectual point of view. She was extremely thoughtful,
reflective, moral, ethical and philosophical and in her hands
fiction remained no more an instrument of mere entertainment but
became an agent of moral edification and psychological study of
human motives and actions. "Again and again it has been
pointed out that fiction in her hands is no longer a mere entertain-
ment; it strikes a new note of seriousness and even of sternness;
it has turned into a searching review of the gravest as well as the
plcasenter aspects of human existence, reassuming the reflective
and discussive rights and duties pertaining to the novel at its
beginnings, without however sacrificing any of the creative
and dramatic qualities that had developed in the intervening
centuries.'**

Whatever came out from the pen of George Eliot was
marked with an honesty of purpose and courageous determination.
^‘She imparted to all that she wrote a fragrance of ardent
sincerity which compensates for many failings of her aesthetic
judgement.”** With these introductory remarks regarding the
general nature of George Eliot’s novels, let us now critically
examine her works.

The works of George Eliot are conveniently divided into
three groups corresponding to the three well marked periods of
her life. In the first group are to be placed her early essays and
iuiscelianeous works. In the second group we include Scenes of
Clerical Life^ Adam Bede, Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner,
all published between 1858 to 1861. The novels of this period
arc based on the author's personal life and experiences. The
scenes in these novels are laid in the country surroundings and

* E, A, Baker— A History of the English Novel.

* ' JLegouis A Cazamiao— A History of Eoglish Literature,

( 286 )

the characters are drawn from the people of the midlands with
whom George Eliot had close familiarity. “They are probably
the author’s most enduring works. They have a naturalness, a
spontaneity; at times a Hash of real humour, which are lacking in
her latter novels and they show a rapid development of literary
power which reaches a climax in Silas Meirner,""* In the third
group are included Romola^ Felix Holt, Middlemarch and
Dciniel Deronda. These novels are philosophical and political in
character and appear to be the product of a laboured artistry. In
them there is the wealth of reflection and analysis of character,
but the peculiar charm of the country life and country character
is missing from them. In them “there is very little ot

inspiration.*'

Scenes of Clerical Life (1858) includes three stories (i) Amos
Barton^ (ii) A/r. GUfils^ Love-Story, iii) Jonet*s Repentance.

These three stories appeared at short serials in Blackwood’s
Magazine during 1857. When they were published in two

volumes as Scenes of Clerical L//f, they caught attention. The
author’s identity was not revealed but when the publisher
demanded a name it was given as ‘George Eliot/ ‘‘In setting and
characters the three stories were derived from Mary-Evans’
childhood surroundings in Warwickshire. With quiet humour
and pathos she depicted rises in the lives of ordinary

people with normal weaknesses. Although superficially resem-
bling the domestic fiction of the decade, the stories had deeper
qualities of naturalness and insight. They were praised by several
leading authors, and Dickens alone suspected that the writer was
a woman. The increasing length of the stories showed her
development towards the larger scope of the novel, and she soon
felt hampered by the monotony imposed by her plan of centring
each story upon a clergyman’s family. By the time Scenes of
Clerical Life was published she was at work upon a full length
novel.’**

Adam Bede.

Adam Bede appeared in the same year as The Ordeal of
Btichard Fever al (1859). In writing her first full length novel

*• W, J, Lons— English Literature,

* Lionel Stevenson— The English Novel, a f'aiiiorania.

( 287 )

she remained as faithful to the environment of her childhood days
as she had been in Scenes of Clerical Life The country
atmosphere comes into its fullest play in this novel. The plot
of this novel is based on a story told to George Eliot by her
aunt Elizabeth Evans, a methodist preacher, and the original of
the Dinah Morris of the novel, of a confession of a child murder
made to her by a girl in prison when she had gone to her for the
redemption of her soul. The story deals with Hetty Sorrel, a
vain and selfish type of girl who starts flirting with Arthur
Donnithorne, a young squire of wealth and fame, after discarding
the sincere love of Adam Bede, a village carpenter. Arthur
Donnithorne is a rake and after enjoying a few years of pleasure
with Hetty he deserts her. Hetty, broken-hearted, consents to
marry Adam Bede, but before the marriige is performed she
gives birth to a child. She makes every possible attempt to tind
Donnithorne but fails in her search. In sheer desperation she
kills her child She is arrested and transported for the rest of
her life. Adam Bede later on marries Dinah Morris, a deeply
religious young Methodist preacher whose serene influence
pervades the whole history.

In Adam Bede George Eliot provides many beautiful and
interesting pictures of English countryside particularly of the
Poyser’s Farm. “The author’s abiding love for the countryside
and her photographic memv‘)ry make the local colour authentic.”

The characters of this novel are drawn with deep insight.
Mrs. Poyser, Hetty, Adam Bede, Author Donnithorne are unfor-
gettable figures. ‘‘Unlike any previous novelist, she was able to
draw rustic characters humorously without a trace of condescen
Jiion : the sententious Mrs. Poyser, in particular, partly based on
the author’s mother, is a noteworthy comic characterization.”*

This book is ethical in tone and directs our attention to the
consequences that most inevitably follow a crime. The moral
severity of the novel is well pronounced.

J he Mill on the Floss (1860).

The Mill on the Floss is an autobiographical novel and
identified with her childhood. In writing this novel George Eliot
dipped once more in the storehouse of memory. In this novel

• Lionel S!te\*€itson^The tnghsb Novel, e Panorama.

( 288 )

she presents her father, brother, aunt and mother with almost
painful hdelity. Tt is a tragedy that moves us to the depth of
our heart. Tom and Maggie are brother and sister. They are
the children of the innocent but haughty and obstinate Mr.
Tullivcr, the miller of Dorlcote Mill on the Floss. Tom and
Maggie have opposing qualities of character. Tom is prosaic,
narrow-minded and hectoring in tone. Maggie representing
George Eliot, is a girl of intense sensibility, having deep
emotional feelings, and artistic tastes. A conflict ensues between
the brother and the sister. Tom does not Jikc Maggie’s love for
Phillip Wakem, the son of lawyer Wakem, who is supposed to be
the evil angel of the family and mainly responsible for the ruin
of the Tulliver family. Under the command of her brother,
Maggie ceases to have all rplations with Phillip. After the death
of her father, Maggie leaves the mill and goes to visit her
cousin Lucy Deane, who is going to be married to the cultivated
and agreeable Stephen Guest. Stephen is attracted towards
Maggie and the girl also responds to the call of Stephen Guest.
When Tom knows all about this he is enraged and a further
rupture ensues between the brother and the sister. In the
meantime a Rood descends upon the town. Maggie forgets all
enmity and goes out to rescue her brother from the Rood. They
move out in a boat. The brother and the sister are reconciled at
the end but unfortunately the boat goes down into the swirling
w^ater of the flood and they are drowned. In their death they
are reconciled.

The Mill on the Floss is wanting in proportion and too much
space is given to the girl and boy experiences. But this is natural
and is explained by the tendency in every man and woman to linger
over early memories. The background of the countryside exhibits
the novelist’s interest in nature and country surroundings. The
characters of the novel, Tom and Maggie, are drawn with great
skill and the character of Maggie is probably George Bliot’s
most profound study of the inner recesses of the human heart.
At places the novel comes over the brink of poetry and it is this
poetic freedom that makes the character of Maggie so magnetic
and charming. The novel is not overburdened by ethical and
moral homilies. It is more psychological than ethical in character

( 289 )

and the style is poetic and graphic at places.

There arc certain defects i^ the novel and they have been
pin-poiiited by Lionel Stevenson in his panoramic survey of the
English Novel in the following words: The M ill on the Floss,
then, is not merely a fervent investigation of love from a woman's
point of view, but is also a truthful unveiling of the author's
inmost feelings. Perhaps it is this extreme degree of personal
involvement that prevents it from being one of her best novels.
Unable to restrain her sympathy for Maggie, even when making
exasperated comments on her faults, she did not maintain the
impartial attitude that gives her other stories the particular power.
This defect may have been brought home to her by several
unfavourable reviews, w^hich were probably influenced by the
knowledge that George Eliot was the scandalous woman who was
living with a married man. At any rate, her next novel scrupu-
lously avoided personal elements.’'*

Silas Marner : The Weaver of Raveloe (1861)— This is
briefer than its two predecessors. It is a shorter novel, marked
with moral earnestness and psychological insight. The ethical
tone comes into prominence for the first time in this novel. The
novel deals with the life of Silas Marner, a poor linen weaver,
who accumulates gold and takes pleasure in enjoying the sighi
of his hoard. He is being robbed of his gold by Duns tan Cass,
the Squire’s reprobate son. Silas is deeply mortified
at ihc loss of his hard earned gold, but this loss
is made up by the incidental coming of a girl, Eppie, to his
cottage whom he adopts as his daughter. Later on it is found out
that Eppie is the daughter of Godfrey Cass and Nancy, Godfrey
Cass being the good son of the squire. Eppie is claimed by her
real parents but she refuses to leave Silas and lives with him.
At the end Silas gets back the stolen gold, for the draining of a
pond near his door reveals the body of Dunstan Cass who had
stolen the gold. The story ends happily and Silas is rewarded for
his patient endurance of the hardships that came in his life. *‘Thc
entire story of Silas Marner is a rustic idyll in the Wordsworthian
tradition, with roots deep in folk legends. The psychology,
however, is as sound as in her other books, and there is mellow

* Lionel Stevenson— The English Novel, a Panonma.

( 290 )

earthy hutnoar ia her sketches of unsophisticated types/** The
novel is rich in excellent pictures of country life and is marked
with flashes of humour which relieve its gloom. The characters ot
Silas, Dunstan Cass, Godfrey and Dolly Winthrop are very finely
drawn.

Romola (1863).

Romola is a great work a£ George Eliot. In this novel
she goes for her plot and characters to Florence of Italy
during the Renaissance period when Savonarola was preaching
his gospel to the people of his country. George Eliot leaves the
familiar background of the midlands for capturing the exotic atmos-
phere of Italy. The novel deals with Romola, the daughter of
an old blind scholar and her love for Tito, a Greek scholar, who
ultimately proves to be a rogue and a scoundrel. Romola, being
disappointed in love, turns for faith to Savonarola but here too
her idealism is shattered when she finds Savonarola falling avay
from his lofty idealism and grovelling in the mire as many others
did in those days.

Romola is remembered not for the Italian atmosphere and
setting, which dissatisfied many people, who had actually been to
Italy, but for the vision of inner life. It is a profound study of
moral development in the character of Romola and of moral
degeneration in Tito. “In a word, Romola is a great moral study
and a very interesting book; but the characters are not Italian,
and the novel as a whole lacks the reality which marks George
Eliot’s English studies.”**

Romola had undermined George Eliot’s health and made
an old woman of her. For two yearj she did not write anything
and when she resumed her work as a novelist, she turned back to
English provincial life, though not to idyllic rural scenes, and
produced three works : Felix Holt (1866), Middlemarchy (1867)
and Daniel Deronda (1871), which burn with a passionate con-
viction and contain some of her best character studies.

Felix Holt.

Felix Holt is a political novel dealing with the English
political affairs at the time of the First Reform Bill. Felix Holt

♦ Ibid.

I W. J« Long— English Literature

( 291 )

is a noble minded young reformer who seeks to impress upon
his fellow workers that their salvation would lie not in agitating
through legislature but through education. In contrast to Felix
Holt stands the figure of Harold Transome, who is neither lofty
in idealism nor moral in his life as a lover. He loves Esther
Lyon, who is disillusioned by his hypocritical ways and marries
Felix Holt. The chief charm of Felix Holt according to Lionel
Stevenson is, “in the love story wherein a frivolous girl is
weaned away from her selfish pastimes by her affection for the
idealistic radical.”*

Daniel Deronda.

It is a novel dealing with Daniel Deronda, a noble-hearted
Jew. Daniel is devoted to the mission of spreading religion. He
refuses to marry Harlegh, a beautiful woman, who being dissatisfied
with the behaviour of her husband Grand Court, turns to Daniel
for marriage. Daniel Deronda refuses to marry her and marries
Mirih, a Jewish woman. He devotes himself to the noble task of
popularising religion.

Middlemarch.

Middlemarch is a study of provincial life and the scene is
laid in the provincial town of Middle March in the first half of
the nineteenth century. It is a love story principally dealing with
the affairs of Dorothea Brooke and Mr. Rosamund Vincy ending
in despair. “In Middlemarch^ the psychology tends more clearly
towards an intuitive idea of mind and consciousness. Her most
powerful novel even if it is not inspired or the most harmoni-
ously constructed, is the last in which the activity of her
courageous, evermoving mind has been expressed in terms of
scenes and figures familiar to herself, and thus endowed with
artistic reality,”**

Q. 70. Give your estimate of George Eliot as a
novelist.

Ans. George Eliot was one of the greatest novelists of
the Victorian Age. Among the women novelists of her age she
occupies a distinctive place and can easily be considerea the

Lionel Stevenson— The English Novel, a Panorama*

Legouis St Cazamiao -A History of English Literature,

( 292 )

precursor of the psychological novel developed during our times.
She was a novelist of intellectual life and like Meredith intellcct-
ualised the novel imparting to it a moral fervour and ethical bias
which it had not yet possessed. In her hands the novel did not
remain merely an instrument of entertainment but became an
effective weapon of moral regeneration and ethical redemption.
An air of sobriety and seriousness characterises her works and
inspite of the humorous thouches that arc introduced here and
there to enliven the rugged tone, she remains essentially a novelist
with a mission. Her seriousness is something which cannot be
cast aside. “It must be remembered that George Eliot was one
of the Victorian “sages” as well as a novelist, one of those who
vi'orried and thought and argued about religion, ethics, history,
character, with all the concern felt by those most receptive to the
many currents of new ideas flowing in Victorian thought and
most sensitive to their implications.”*

Plot Construction — George Eliot did not very much care
for plot construction on the conventional Victorian lines. In the
formation of her plots she was not governed by any standard
formula. She had certain ideas to convey through the medium ot
her novels and she gave them the farthest logical development
i.n her works. Hers arc the “first novels ‘which set out to give a
picture of life wholly unmodified by those formulas of a good plot
which the novel had taken over from comedy and romance. Her
story is conditioned solely by the logical deminds ot situation or
character, it ends sadly or happily, includes heroes or omits them,
deals with the married or the unmarried, according as reason and
observation lead her to think likely. In fact, the laws conditioning
form of George Eliot’s novels arc the same laws that condition
those of Henry James and Wells and Conard and Arnold Bennet.

I lets are the first examples in English of the novel in its mature
form; in them it structurally comes of age.”**

Her realism— The novels of George Eliot realistically
present the life of Midlands, Warwickshire and Derbyshire. The
intimate touch of personal knowledge about the kind of life lived
in these areas is felt by every reader ,who goes through them.

David Daiches : A Critical History of Bpgiiih Literature,

** David Cecil : Early Victorian Novelists. '

( 293 )

Scene after ^icene, character after ebar^^' er, in tbe^c novels have
been identified with places and persons with whom George Eliot
had been familiar. In her latter novels, particularly Rojnola she
cast aside the realism which had characterised her work in Adam
BedCt Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner but later on, atlcast once
in the Middlemarcfu she came back to her favourite theme of the
countryside and its surroundings in Warwickshire and Derbyshire.
In Romola she had presented Italian life which she had tried tos
the first time. However she could not achieve much success in
the portrayal of a foreign land. Here she faltered and failed. It
IS only once again in Middlemarck that she could hold out a
gleam of her former glory and her realistic portraiture of life.

As a psychologist — Meredith and George Eliot are psycholo-
gical novelists of the Victorian Age and both of theni tried to
iocuss the light not on the external trappings of personality but
on the inner struggle in the souls of their characters. George
Idiot sought to reveal and analyse the motives, impluses, and
intluenccs that worked in the formation of her characters.
Analysis of the motives of her characters was her
main forte. She brought to bear on the novel the
searching imagination of a rationalist and philosophical
thinker. The stamp of a highly skilled intellect, a probing
mind and a searching analytic faculty can be telt on every
I^age of her novel. She was a successful psychological novelist
and to represent the inner history an I inner life of her characters
was her main preoccupation. “All happenings she showed, are
but the meeting and intermingling of courses of events that hive
their source in the inner history of mankind.*^

Her seriousness — The great contribution ol Ci-eorge Eliot
to the n )vel was that she made it an object ot seriousness, gravity,
loftiness and solemnity. For her the novel was nor a chief source
of entertainment and relaxation. She made it an instrument for
philosophic thinking and posed problems in her novels which only
very serious thought of a high level could possibly solve. “Again
and again it has been pointed out that fiction in her hand is ao
longer a mete entertainment, it strikes a new note of seriousness
and even of sterness; it has turned int > a fseaiching review of tke
• W, J, Cross-v^e^l^pmentof the English Novel,

( 294 )

gtayest as well as the pleasanter aspects of human existence,
reassuming the reflective and discursive rights and duties pertain-
ing to the novel at its beginnings, without however sacrificing
any of the creative and dramatic qualities that had in the
intervening developed centuries.*'*

As a moralist ~ George Eliot was a moralist at the he|p;t and
the general tone and temper of her novels is that of moral earnest-
ness and austere gripness. As a moralist George Eliot laid emph-
asis on the performance of one’s duty and leading a virtuous
and righteous life. F. W, Myer’s conversation with George

Eliot at Cambridge in 1873 shows what she thought of duty in
life. ‘‘She stirred somewhat beyond her wont, and taking as
her text the three words which have been used so often as the
inspiring trumpet calls of men — the words God^ Immortality — Dufy
pronounced, with terrible earnestness how inconceivable
was the first, how unbelievable the second, and yet how peremptory
and absolute the third-"^ A slip in conduct in her view

was likely to lead to serious consequences resulting in the
deterioration of characters. Tito’s degeneration in Romola;
Lydgate’s fall in Middlemarch, Gwendolen Harleth’s
humiliation and recovery in Daniel Deronda were brought about
by their lapses in moral conduct. She showed, through their
discomfitures and decline, that disobedience to moral laws brought
utter ruin to human life.

George Eliot believed that life is just. She was sure that
‘'those who live virtuous life are essentially contented, that those
who live a vicious life are essentially discontented. However
well meaning you might be or howcverMucky, she was sure that
you cannot escape the consequences of your own actions; that
your sins rind you out, that the slightest slip will be visited on
you, if not immediately then later.”f

Her Characters— George Etiot’s principal interest was in
character portrayal, particularly the inner man. She was not so
much interested in presenting external appearance and idiosyn-

* B A Baker - History of the English Novel
V David Cecial— Early Victorian Novelists,

( 295 )

crasies of her characters as in revealing their inner life. ‘"We do
not remember her serious characters by their appearance or the
way they talk, indeed we do not remember these things clearly
at all. Her portraits arc primarily portraits of the inner
man.”*

George Eliot’s art in characterization lies in the fact that
her characters evolve and grow as the novel proceeds ahead. They
are not fixed. They continue to grow either for the worse or for
the better. They go from weakness to strength or from strength
to weakness. This is exhibited in the degradation that comes in
the character of Tito in Romola and Lidget in Middlemarclu In
the beginning these two characters are presented to be noble and
good but gradually they decline and go down the slippery way of
degradation and moral ruin.

The characters of George Eliot are governed by moral
considerations. They have a leaning for the moral side. They
are always true to themselves. They are consistent. “Through
every change of fortune, every variety of circumstance, they remain
the same clear recognizable individual moral entities.’’

George Eliot achieved success in portraying complex
characters like Maggie Tulliver and Tito. “It is the habit of my
imagination”, said George Eliot, “to strive after as full a vision
of the medium in which a character moves as of the character
itself.”

George Eliot’s female characters are better drawn than her
male characters and her male figures are maked with a woman’s
attitude towards the male sex. Nearly always the subject is
studied from the women’s point of view, the women are so vastly
superior to their lovers that it is difficult for the reader to
appreciate all that it means for them.

George Eliot’s characters have generally been identified
with her relatives and friends. Dinah Morris in Adam Bede is
after the fashion of her aunt. Mcs. Poyser, Hetty’s aunt, is
said to show some traits of George Eliot’s mother. Adam Bede
was drawn from her father. The picture of Maggie Tulliver in
^Ull on the Floss is her own personal study. Her brother Tom
is Isac and hex father is portrayed in the owner of the Mill.

David Cecil : Early Victorian Noveliais

( 296 )

reorge Eliofs humour — Though George Eliot wa-
essent'ally a novelist of the tragic life representing the shadow;
that cross human existence, yet to relieve the tedium of her novels
she introduced comic characters marked with flashes ol
humour. The humour in her novels rises principally through her
rustic characters like Mrs. Poyser. She could paint humorous
charge ters who could provide mirth to her readers. Her humour
became ironical and satirical in character. The Dodson sisters
arc a pleasant source of ironical humour and the same is true ot
Mrs. Glegg's frequ^r t quarrels with Mr. Glegg.

George Eliot kept certain subjects away from the plain of
humour. *'Shc thought it shockingly heartless to make fun of
people’s tender feelings, or sacred aspirations. Even at its brightest
her humour is not exuberant. But within its limitations it is both
individual and delightful. Intelligence gives it edge ; good
humour gives it glow : it sparkles over the comedy of rustic
provincial life, at once cool and mellow, incisive and genial.'’’*

Her Pathos— The pathos in the novels of George Eliot is
touching. She is genuinely pathetic rather then sentimental in
the presentation of her heart-rending tragedies. “George Elior
completed the work of Wordsworth. He dealt with the pathos
of the pastoral life in a spirit of measureless humanity; she min-
gled its pathos with humour and produced the greatest dramatic
effect.”

Her style — George Eliot’s style in her early novels is
lucid and simple but later on it becomes reflective and abstract
“Her style, through many a page, through whole chapters
and episodes, has the indefinable quality that suggests a lesson in
psychology, ethics or history.”**

Q. 7*. Give a critical account of the main novels of George
Meredith (1828-1909).

Ans. George Meredith was one of the greatest of the
Victorian novelists. He was a psychological novelist interested in
unfolding and unravelling the inner life of his characters tod tbeit

David Cecil— Early Victorian Novelists. , ,

** Legouis Caaamian'-History of Er^glish t\ erature.

( 297 )

motives. He could not be a popular novelist like Dickens nor was
he a feast for pallets nursed on the savoury food of Dickens. He
was a novelist for the intellectuals who could have the patience of
threading through the intricacies of his thought evolution and
crabbedness of his prose style. Only those who had been endowed
with a suppleness of mind, a lively wit and a comic spirit could
alone possibly enjoy the novels of this great doyen of fiction
during the Victorian Age. "With Meredith the "new” novel is
upon us with a vengeance-obliqueness, indirectness, elaborate
psychological analysis, sustained intellectuality and all the rest
of it.”*

The earliest work of Meredith was The Shaving of Sha^pnt
(1856). It is an oriental story and furnishes an elaborate imitation
of the Arabian Nights. It is a burlesque oriental story and the
author adopts the form and style of Beckford who produced
Vi'thek in the eighteenth century. "In the love incidents and love
scenes, in exuberance of imagery, in picturesque wildness of inci-
dent, in significant humour, in aphoristic wisdom, it was a new
Arabian Night.”**

Farina (1857) followed The Shaving of Shag pat. It is a
burlesque of German romance and embodies some interesting
reminiscences of Meredith’s education in Geriiiany. It is modelled
on the medieval folklore of the Rhineland.

Three years after the Shaving of Shagpat Meredith produced
bis first great novel The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. This novel
represents the conflict between traditional authority of patents and
the new upsurge of youth in revolt. Here the author brings out
the conflict between Richard Feverel and his father Sir Austin
Feveral, a weilthy baronet. Sir Austin brings up his son according
to his own pattern of thought. When Richard comes of age he
breaks away from his father’s tyrannical hold and starts loving
Lucy Desborough, a neighbouring farmer’s niece. They secretly
marry. When Sit Austin knows of this marriage he adopts a
clever stratagem to break the marriage. He wins over his son to
his side and sends him to London to redeem an erring beautiful
woman with whom he falls in love. Later on Richard knows that

’ Wagenknecht : Cavalcade of the Engish Novel,

* ' Hugh Walker The I iierature of the Victorian Era

( 298 )

his former wife Lucy had given birth to a child and he had become
a father. Lucy is reconciled to Sir Austin and the way to happi-
ness is opened for Lucy and Richard but it is never consummated
Richard learns of the designs of Lord Mount Falcon on Lucy
and challanges him to a duel. Richard is seriously wounded. The
shock of the serious injury to Richard upsets Lucy and she dies of
the shock. The Ordeal of Richard Feverel is weak in plot construc-
tion and the conclusion is rather unbelievable. The scenes of nature
and love between Lucy and Richard are presented exquisitely in a
charming manner. The poetic touches in this novel make it
beautiful. Bur most of the critics of the day were dissatisfied with
the work. The unfavourable reception was based not so much
upon its obscurity as upon its immorality. The treatment of sex
does not shock modern readers but the Victorians could not
possibly swallow it and the book was banned by Moodies' chain
of circulating libraries which had the power to establish or destroy
the reputation of a new novelist.

Evan Harrington, which followed in 1861, is an autobiogra-
phical novel and represents the attempt of a sister married to a
Pourtugese nobleman to launch her brother Evan Harrington on
■high life and make him look a nobleman. Evan Harrington is the
son of a tailor. Evan’s sister. Countess de Saldar, marries ;i
Pourtugese nobleman. She makes every possible effort to present
her brother as a person of noble birth and make him look
impressive in social life. The novel recounts the adventures of
Evan Harrington in search of eminence.

Rhoda Fleming (1865) is an interesting study in feminine
psychology. The main scuiiig of this novel is a farming comma
nity and the central situation is close to that of Adam Bede, The
author deals with the amorous adventures and intrigues of two
sisters, Rhoda and Dahlia Fleming, daughters of Kentish Yeoman
farmer. This novel is more realistic than George Eliot's Adam
Bede, *‘lt stands apart from the rest of Meredith’s work not only
in its rustic milieu but also in its relatively straightforward
narration and unadorned style.”*

Vittoria (1870) is Meredith’s nearest approach to a full-dress
listorical roiirance. Soon after this historical talc of romance,

* Lionel Suvenson— -The Fngtiih Novel, n Panorama

K }

came The Adventures of Harry Richmond which appeared anony-
mously in the Cornhill Magazine in 1871. This novel is concerned
with delusions of grandeur.

The three greit novels of Meredith that deserve special
Mention 2 Ltii Beauchamp s Career (1875), TZ/c Egoist (1879) and
Diana of the Crossways (1885), Beaucliamp\s Carter is a political
novel and it is very much different from the romantic fervour of
The Adventures of Harry Richmond. The disillusioned astringcncy
of Beauchamp^ s Career seems cold blooded after the romance The
Adventures of Harry Richmond. Becuchamp^s Career is a political
novel and its main theme is that of the English party — politics,
shortly after the middle of the nineteenth century. Navil Beauchamp
begins his career in navy where he shines out as a gallant officer.
He gains the approval of his uncle Hombtcy. a medieval baron.
Navil enters into politics and tails under the influence of Dr.
Sharpnel a radical-thinker. He does not succeed in his plan and
1 C defeated in his political pursuits. Later on Navil falls in bwe
with Cecilia Halkett, an English girl, but is unable to achieve
success in love. He is defeated both in politics as well as in love.
Happiness comes to him at a later stage but after a few month's
happiness he meets his death while attempting to rescue a child
from the sea. The tragic conclusion of the novel is arbitrarily
imposed on this work and ends with an episode that seems to
resemble Hardy’s capitulation to blind chance. The concentration
of the novelist is on the tragic obscurity of Beauchamp's
inadequate power of judgment.

The Egoist (1879) is a ‘comedy in narrative’ of which the
central figure is Sir Willoughby Patterne, a man of position and
power, but extrem ly self-centred and conceited in his life. Sir
Willoughby is loved by Lactitia, a poor and shy girl but the self-
conceited man rejects her and loves Constantia Durham, who
later on elopes with an officer of hussars. This flight of Constan-
tia is the first humiliation that Sir Willoughby has to undergo in
his life. Being disappointed, he draws towards Clara Middleton,
the daughter pf an epicurean professor, and wins her hand in a
whirlwind courtship. He is jilted the second time and Clara
proves a source of humiliation to the proud, conceited and self
centred man. Clara marries Vernon Whitford, and Willoughby,

f 300 )

in sheer despair, unites himself to Laetitia Dole.

This novel is formless and the plot is extremely complicated
and jumbled: “Indeed, one can scarcely speak of plot at all, what wc
have instead is design, pattern. The pattern, as the hero’s name
suggests, of the Willow Pattern Plate. Sir Willoughby Patternc.
that admirable Crichton, the hero of self-regard, having been jilted
by Constantia Durham, jilts Laetitia Dole in order to marry
Claru Middleton, is jilted by her in the end, stripped of his
pretensions casts into abject nakedness; is compelled to marry
Laetitia on her own terms. It is as simple as that.”^

“This book has a Moliere — like concentration upon the
foibles of a central character. Sir Willoughby Patterne, a monster
of self-concern. In portraying him, and settling him in his environ-
ment of a noble country-house and the English landscape,
Meredith offers the reader, through every possible distortion ot
English syntax, a picture of life in which the Chiaroscurs,
the dominant tone, is one of April sun and shower with
all the flowers of BotticelH alight in a young green world.”**
Meredith disapproves the egoism of Sir Willoughby’s
discomfiture.

*‘Sir Willoughby, in particular, is anatomized as no previous
character in fiction had been. The author apparently despises him
to the verge of loathing, and yet makes us realize that his contem-
ptible behaviour springs from traits that are present in every man.
Sir Willoughby is not a villain. In the eyes of most people —
including himself — he is a paragon. His final humiliation, like
that of Malvolio in Twelfth Nighty awakens our pity more than
our satisfaction.

From the technical point of view The Egoist shows the
fuller development of Meredith’s individual manner. Every
paragraph of this novel is enriched by the use of figurative
language including symbols and metaphors that supply a unifying
pattern.

The Egoist was better received than any of Meredith’s
previous books. Critics had now come round to the view that a

* Hugh Walker: The Literature of the .Victorian Era.

* Waller Allen : The English Novel,
t Lionel Stevenson : 1 he English Novel, a panorama.

< 301 )

M(>od work of fiction ought to be charictcrtscd by intellectual
vigour and subtleties. In Meredith’s work they found the new
leaven of intellect. Dissatisfied with the traditional products ot
popular novelists, they acclaimed The Egoist as their ideal.

Diana of the Crossway (1885) is a political novel, and its
popularity can be judged from the fact that in three months three
editions of the book were sold out. Here for once critical judgment
and popular judgment were in accord and harmony. This novel
iias been recognised “as Meredith’s strongest etfort to forward
the emancipation of Victorian womanhood, but from it the reader
comes to the conclusi »n that ^ woman cannot stand alone and
triumph.*'*

The theme of this novel is based on the romantic storv ot
the lovely and celebrated Mrs. Caroline Norton, Sheridan’s grand
daughter. This lady had been badly treated by her husband and
she wrote pamphlets on behalf of woman. It was alleged that she
had sold a cabinet secret (Peel’s resolve to abolish the Corn Laws)
to 1 he Times, This lady formed the heroine of Diana of the
( and everyone recognised in Diana, the figure of Mrs.
Caroline Norton. Diana was the emancipated Victorian woman on
whom the Victorians frowned with disfavour. “From a literary
point of view Diana is inferior to The Egoist, although, like all
Meredith’s work it is instinct with beauty, wit and poetry.”**

In a trilogy of novel — One of Our Conquf^rorSy Lord Orment
ond his Aminta and The Amazing Marriage^-wtitten towards the
end of Meredith’s literary career, he showed a knack in presenting
the relationships between men and women when these were
influenced by considerations of pride of birth; social position, and
the question of legitimacy.

Q. 72 Give your estimate of George Meredith as a
Novelist.

Ans. George Meredith was the great intellectual and
psychological novelist of the Victorian Age. “No writer of the
nineteenth century stands more alone than he (Meredith), and
none is more difficult to deal with. Browning himself is not more

* Richard Church : The Growth of the Foglish Novel
Hugh Walker : The Literatuio of the Victurian bra,

( 302 }

original. Here and there the reader may be reminded of Carlyl
or of Thackeray or of Browning.’^

Meredith’s art of story telling and plot construction.

As a story teller Meredith could not achieve that succe;
which fell to the lot of Dickens and George Eliot. He was nor
narrator and hardly pretended to tell a story. In the opinion «
Oscar Wilde Meredith could do anything ‘^except tell a story

His plotb are extremely confusing and complicated and it
really very difficult for a reader to thread through the intricacies <
his plot construction.

Sometimes Meredith arbitrarily thrusts certain conclusior
on his plots which will not be warranted by the sequence of event
In Richard Feveral and in Beauchamp^s Career the tragic ending
arbitrarily imposed and many readers have felt dissatisfied wit
the way in which these two great novels have been concludec
|. B. Priestley’s opinion regarding Meredith’s story telling j
worthy of our consideiation. He says in his admirable study o
Meredith in the English Men of Letters Series^ *‘If we regard th
novel as a tale, pure and simple, an arresting and convincin'
chronicle of events, Meredith must inevitably appear a colossa
failure. From the point of view of narration, every novel that h
wrote was not merely faulty but downright bad. The movemen
of the story is lame and awakward, the different part& arc not wel
knitted; there are loose ends dangling everywhere. We fint
ourselves caught up in the vast glittering webs of his plots am
know the exhilaration of unravelling them.”

As a psychological novelist.

Meredith was a psychological novelist and his interest wai
not so much in the presentation of external realities of life such a*
Dickens and Thackeray had viewed : but in the revelation of tht
inner soul of his characters. He dealt with the invisible life and
threw light on the inner problems and involutions of thought. Ir
his novel all incidents are coloured by psychological touches anc
are described not as they would strike an observer, but from thi
point of view of the actor.

Intellectual quality.

Meredith’s novels like that of George Eliot are marked witlr

C 303 )

note ot intellectuality. ‘‘Like the chief poets of the times they
licorge Meredith and George Eliot) reflected far more than ihzit
lopular predecessors the intellectual interests of England of their
inies.”

^Uredith’s opposition to senfimcntalism.

Being a novelist of the intellectual life Meredith was
irongly opposed to any representation of sentimentalism in his
ovels. It is a standing charge against the novels of Dickens that
c often sentimentalises, particularly in the presentation of pathos
rul death scenes. This charge cannot be levelled against the
lovcls of Meredith. In his novels sentimentalism is subjected to
he hammer blows of the comic spirit,
he comic spirit and comedy in Meredith’s novels.

The novels of Meredith display the central working of the
omic spirit. He tersely explains what he considers to be the
ssence of the comic spirit in the opening sentences of The

The comic spirit is the weapon of intelligence and reason
gainst stupidity and dullness. It is the voice of civilisation
gainst barbarism. ‘Tt is the ‘sword of commonsense', by which
Lich evils as hypocrisy, conceit, egoism, and false pretensions to
ocial eminence arc crushed. It is essentially a satiric spirit —
gainst tradition or prejudice, social stupidity or individual
oily.*’

Meredith’s novels work under the influence of the comic
pirit and the novelist satirises folly, stupidity, egoism, sentitnen-
ality where these vices arc found. Meredith’s comic spirit is very
losely akin to Benjonson’s comedies and plays the same part as
t does in the comedies of the great Elizabethan dramatist,
leredifh’s creed.

Meredith's novels present an optimistic attitude towards life,
he rosy picture of a glossy, future is unfolded in his pages. Mcre-
tth feels confident in the hope of an improved human race in the
Jturc. He suggests that “individual life does not die, it lives on in
lie larger, richer life of the future which it helps to build up.”
jest as he sees hope for individual and for race in the
rocess of evolution, so, too, Meredith trusts in growth and change
» bring about social and political advance. More brain power, the

( 304 )

cultivation of xeason and of intellect, the help of the comic spirit
alone can bring tbe strength to get rid of undesirable conditions.
He bates the materialism and meanness and faithlessness of
modern life, above alJ, he hates the undue preponderance given to
wealth, and the enervation and weakness to which it leads. Yet
everywhere, amid prevalent evil, he recognizes signs of progress
and ultimate good, he believes in the worth of human fellowship
and the duty of service. Such service can be rendered only as
result of the knowledge that comes from a resolute facing of fact*;
in nature and in human life.*’*

Mereiiith^s cliaracters

Meredith’s characters, both male and female, are drawn
from aristocratic and upper middle-class society. His characters
arc presented with a deep psychological insight and the novelist
probes deep into the hearts of his men and women and successfully
presents their psychological motives in undertaking a particular
line of action. His characters are psychological and seldom speak
as naturally as the characters of George Eliot do. “They arc
more like Browning’s characters in packing a whole paragraph
into a single sentence or an exclamation.*’**

■‘Meredith achieves eminent success in the portrayal ot
women and his heroines arc better drawn than his heroes. As a
delineator of women he stands alone among the nineteenth century
novelists for the sheet poetic intensity with which he realized the
infinite variety,'*:]:

Meredith’s Style.

Meredith’s prose style in his novels is as difficult as that
of Sterne, Carlyle and Browning. He is one of those novelists
“who have whimsically misused English ianguage.’*f

He does not speak directly to the readers. He speaks
through maxims and aphorisms. “Both in prose and in poetry
Meredith is a difficult writer, and this is due only in part to the
profundity of his thought. His wit and his consequent delight
in the skilful play of language sometimes lead him astray ; be

• E. A. Baker : English Novel,

« * W. J. Long English I iterature:

{ Diana Neill : A Short Historyof the English Novel,
f Cro^t I Development of the BogHsh Novel.

( 305 )

is SO anxious to avoid the commonplace that at times he falls into
obscurity by what seems sheer wilfulness. Another reason for
his occasional obscurity is his wilful and deliberate use of
elliptical sentences. No writer is more allusive in style than
Meredith. His language is naturally metaphorical and symbo-
lical; he does not seek comparisons, they spring to his lips
unsought. As a result he is seldom direct and simple in his
appeal. Again, he has a great deal to say, and is able to express
himself by many different methods which jostle each other for
precedence, so that his language is apt to become burdened with
the richness of ai over-blowing imagination. His aim is to
compress into a few words profound thought and memorable
images.

Conclusion : ^

Due to his enigmatic style and his psychology
Meredith will never be popular, but by thoughtful men and
women he will probably be ranked among our greatest writers
of fiction. “He was no poseur. Even those who are most annoyed
hy his idiosyncrasies find his work persistently coming back
to them, long after they had imagined they were done with him.
He has vitality despite all his indiscretion ; a profound sincerity
underlies his innumerable flourishes. In some inexplicable way,
his pages seem curiously flooded w'ith light.”**

Q. 73. What are the main points of similarity and difference
between George Eliot and George Meredith ?

Ans. George Eliot and George Meredith were the promi-
nent novelists of the Victorian age. They were psychological
novelists interested in the study of inner life. They were equally
interested in the problems of human conduct, and considered
f'clfishncss as the root cause of all our troubles. The following
werds of George Meredith in Rhoda Fleming seem to be like those
of Grcorge Eliot.

“He closed, as it were a black volume, and opened
a new and bright one. Young men easily fancy that they may

J Long ; Lnglish Literature.

Wageoknecht : Cavalcade of the English Novel.

( 306 )

do this, and that when the black volume is shut the tide is
stopped. Oar deathlessness is in what we do, not in what
wc are.’’

The differences between George Eliot and George Meredith
are even more striking than their resemblances. George Eliot
worked through tragedy, Mererdith through comedy. George
Eliot’s flair is always for the tragic side of life, George Meredith’s
for the comic. So completely was Meredith committed and
engrossed to the comic standpoint that he saw the woeful story of
Ferdinand Lassalle and Helena Von Donniges as the history of a
pair of “tragic co'iiedians.” George Eliot’s approach was ethical
to the problems confronting her characters, Meredith’s approach
was that of a poet. “George Eliot identified religion so completely
with the dogqjas she discarded that having lost the dogmas, she
never found religious certitude again. Meredith, on the other
hand, worked out a philosophy of life which, whether he was
right or wrong, completely satisfied his conscious needs. George
Eliot, though she rearranged her material to suit her thesis, still
attempted a realistic representation of life. Meredith’s picture of
life, on the other hand, can be called realistic only if God is i
Meredithian.”*

#

Q. 74. Give a brief account of the main novels of Thomas
Hardy (1840—1928).

Ans. Thomas Hardy was one of the greatest novelists of
the modern age. and though he has not been given a place among
the ten great novelists by Sorner‘«et Maugham, yet his place is
ensured among the greater masters of fiction in the Victorian and
the Modern Age. Hardy was essentially a writer of tragedies and
human life. His interest lay in the presentation of the grim and
sombre scenes of human life and he became more solemn and
serious than George Eliot could possibly be. He gave to the
novel the dignity which had earlier belonged to the epic and to
tragedy. “In spite of the loving exactitude with which he deals
the characteristic features of Wessex life, he never lets us forget
that this Wessex life is the part of the life of the whole human

’ Wagfuknecht ; Cavalcade of the English Novel

( 307 )

race and is inextricably connected with it.”*

Hardy wrote a large number of novels and his works have
been classified in a different way by different critics. Some
have classified his works as tragedies or comedies or idylls, while
others like Professor Lascelles Abercrombie have chosen to
classify his novels as dramatic novels and epic novels.
Those novels which have a single story and arc free from
secondary stories and plots and where one single person
dominates the entire scene have been included under the heading
of epic novels by Abercrombie. Tess of the D'urhervilles
and Jude the Obscure are included in the list of epic novels because
the stories are concerned with the rise and fall in the destiny
of a single person. In novels which have been classified as dramatic
it is not man but a group of complex characters that interest us.
In dramatic novels there is a clash of interests and
this clash gives rise to a conflict which is the essence
of a dramatic plot. In these novels there is a rich-
ness of dramatic episodes. The novelist is always in the back-
ground. Whereas in the epic novels the personality of the novelist
obtrudes, in the form of moralisings, in dramatic novels it is
generally kept apart. Judged from this standard, four novels of
Hardy, namely Far From the Madding Crowd, The Return of the
Motive, The Woodlanders and The Mayor of Casterbridge
are considered dramatic novels. Another method of classifying
Hardy’s novels can be as follows :

1. Novels of Character and Environment.

1 Under the Greenwood Tree (1872).

2 Fat From the Madding Crowd (1874).

3 The Return of the Native (1878).

4 The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886).

5 The Woodlanders (1887).

6 Wessex Tales (1888)

7 Tess of the D’urbcrvilles (1891).

8 Life’s Little Ironies and a Few Crusted Characters (1894\

10 Jude the Obscure (1895).

It. Romances and Fantasies.

1 A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873)-

David Cecil : Early Victorian Novelists.

^ 308 )

2 The Trumpet Major (1880).

3 Two on a Tower (1882).

4 A Group of Noble Dames (1891)

5 The Well Beloved (1897).

Ilf. Novels of Ingenuity.

(1) Desperate Remedies (1871).

(2) The Hand of Ethclberta (1876).

(3) A Laodicean (1881).

IV. Mixed Novels.

(1) A Charged Man, The Waiting Supper and other Tales.

Hardy wrote more than twenty novels but Douglas Brown
mentions eight novels to represent Hardy’s strength. “The novels
I take to represent his strength are Far From the Madding Crowds
The Return of the Native, The WoodlandersfThe Mayor of Casterbridge
and Tess of the D*urhcrvitles. To these five. Under the Greenwood
Tree makes a fitting prelude, and Jude the Obscure (where Hardy
ranges so much more ambitiously) an impressive epilogue. One
other among the novels deserves particular respect, the modest but
effective The Trumpet Major**

Having classified the main novels of Thomas Hardy let us
examine the novels on which his fame is likely to hinge in the
years to come.

Under the Greenwood Tree (1872)

This early novel of Hardy, originally called The Melhtock
Quire, reads like a first draft for the fiction of Hardy’s maturity. It
has been considered a rural idyll. It is an idyll set in the country
surroundings of Mcllstock village. It describes the life of two
young lovers Dick Dewy, son of the local ‘tranter’ and Fancy Day,
the school mistress, who are happily married at the end. The
novel is a picturesque study of country life and scenery and fores-
tails Hardy's interest in the country surroundings.

Far from the Madding Crowd (1873—74)

In this novel Hardy deals with the life and country surroun-
dings, far away from the madding crowd and ignoble strife of
cities. It represents the love of Gabriel Oak, a selfless, devoted
shepherd for Bathsheba Everdene, the capricious heroine for the
showy Sergeant Troy of the town, whom she marries for his exter-
nal polish and cultured manners. Bathsheba is disillusiotted and

( 309 )

after the death of Sergeant Troy and Farmec Boldwood, another
lover of Bathsheba^ she marries Gabriel Oak. The novel ends oji
a note of triumph for the devoted Gabriel. The characters
ot this novel are finely drawn and the rural surroundings are
in keeping with the general tone of the novel.

I he Return of the Native (1878).

The scene in this novel is the sombre Egdon Heath, repre-
sentative of the country near Warhem in Dorset. In this novel
Nature enters more than any other novel of Hardy. It is indeed
the story of Egdon Heath. Egdon is not only the scene of the
tale, it dominates the plot and determines the characters. It is
sentient, it feels, it speaks, it slays. The book opens with an
impressive introduction to Egdon Heath which works as the main
protagonist of the drama. The story of the novel is concerned
with five important characters — Damon Wildcve, Thomasin
Veobright, Eustacia Vye, Clym and Diggory Venn. Damon
Wildeve, an engineer, marries Thomasin Ycobright who rejects her
humble adorer, the rcddleman, Diggory Venn. Her cousin Clym,
a diamond merchant in Paris comes back to Egdon with the
intention of becoming a school-master is his native country. The
title of the novel refers to the return of Clym Yeobright, the
native to Egdon. He is disgusted with Paris life and that is perhaps
the reason why he comes back to his native country. He falls in
love with Eustacia and she marries him in the hope that she would
he able to persuade Clym to go back to Paris and lead a roman-
tic life with her. Much against Eustacia's will Clym settles down
in the country surroundings and becomes a furze-cutter after the
loss of his eye-sight, Eustacia feels dissatisfied with Clym and
carries on her meetings with Wildeve. the engineer, with whom
i’lie ultimately elopes. Eustacia and Wildeve arc drowned as they
manage to escape through a stormy river. Clym considering
himself responsible for the death of his mother and his wife
l)econies an itinerant preacher. Thomasin marries Diggory
Venn.

The Mayor of Casterbridge ( 1886 )

The Mayor of Casterbridge is the study of Michael Henchard,
a haytresser who sells his wife Sussan for five guineas to a sailor,
Newson in a state of drunkenness at a country fair. Returning to

( 310 )

his senses he makes a frantic search for his wife and takes i
solemn vow not to touch intoxicants for twenty years, Hencharc
starts working hard and by virtue of his energy and understandin-
of corn business, he becomes the Mayor of Casterbridge. Aftei
a few years troubles start in his life and his own manage]
Donald Farfrae proves to be the greatest stumbling block in tht
way of his life, llenchard’s business is ruined partly because o
his own audacity and hot temper and partly because of his faitl
in a soothsayer. He is beint^ ruined in love and in business b)
Farfrae. Ultimately Ilenchard meets his death in very pitiable
circumstance. The end of Michael Henchard, the Mayor of
C^asterbridge, brings tears to our eyes. In this novel Hardys
characterization is superb and the characters of Henchard, his
step daughter hilizibeth Jane, Donald Farfrae and Lucetta have
been very nicely drawn. This is the only of the Wessex novels in
which the action occurs mainly in a town. The play of destiny
in human life is brought out in its fullest from in the life of
Michael Henchard. The novel is essentially a study of character,
the character of Michael Henchard whose problem is “neitber
religious faith nor sexual relations but self-control.^’

The Woodlanders (1887).

The Woodlanders has been considered by Lionel Stevenson
the best novel of Hardy. The scene in this novel is the wooded
country of Dorset. The story deals with the life of Gilej:
Winterbourne who is betrothed to Grace Melbury, the daughter of
a timber merchant. The lady goes out to attend a fashionable
school from where she comes out with changed colours. She
refuses to marry Giles Winterbourne under the instructions of her
ambitious father who seeks to bring the former engagement wi^b
Giles to an end on account of the financial misfortune that befell
Giles at this time. Grace Melbury is attracted by a young
doctor Fitzpiers, whom she consents to marry. Fitzpiers marries
Melbury but soon deserts her and elopes with Mrs. Charmonds.
After the death of Chatmond, Grace and Fitzpiers are
reconciled.

Parallel to the devotion of Giles to Grace is the devotion
of Marty South, a simple country girl, to Giles Winterbourne.
Winterbourne meets his death at the end. Marry and Grace

( 311 )

regularly visit tomb. At the end of the book Marty ; alone
remains the true remembrancer of Giles Winterbourne, for Mclbury
is ultimately united to her former husband. The charm of the
novel lies in its country surroundings and the devotion of Marty
South to Giles Winterbourne,
less of Ihe D’Urbervilles — A Pure Woman (1891).

Tess is the study of a ^pure woman’ who is the victim ot
in inflexible moral law and inexorable social code Tess is die
daughter of a poor foolish villager of B ackmoor Vale. She thinks
liiit she is the descendant of the ancient family ot D'Urbcrville.
Tess is seduced by Alec, a young man whose parents bear the
lurname of D’Urbcrville with doubtful right to it. Tess gives
lirth to a child as the result of her forced indulgence with Mcc. The
:hild dies in infancy.' After sometimes Tess is attracted by Angel
Uare, a clergyman’s son. On their wedding night she confesses to
icr husband her former love affair with Alec. Angel is shocked
u the narration of Tess's former love with Alec and abandons her
Misfortune and hardship dog Tess and she is once more driven to
iccept the protection of Alec. Angel Clare, after his return irom
•drazil, finds his wife in a difficult situation. He repents tor his
harshness towards his wife Tess. Tess feels uncomfortable under
he charge of Alec and murders him to liberate herself from his
»nld. After a brief period of concealment with her husband
lare in the New Forest, Tess is arrested, tried and hanged,
‘lustice was done and the President of the Immortals (in Aeschy-
^*an phrase) had ended his sport with Tess. Tess pays her debt
^ the social court.” It is Hardy’s tragic masterpiece, and is his
most ambitious tragic novel. ‘‘It is a great tragedy.”

•Jude the Ob^^cure (1855).

Jude the Obscure is the story, in the author’s own words, “of a
^^adly war waged with apostolic desperation between flesh and
pirit.’" The novel concentrates on the aspirations of Jude Fa wley,
J^outh-Wessex villager, for learning. Jude is not able to achieve
uccess in his plans on account of his sensuous temperament, lack
character and the play of circumstances. Early in his life
' he is still eager to acquire knowledge, he is lured by the
harm of Arabella Donn, a ‘mere female animal’ and marries her.
the stone mason, is deserted by Arabella. He once again

( 312 )

Starts his studies in right earnest and the object that he keeps be-
fore. him this time is to shine out as a priest. But again he is deflected
from his course of learning and falls in love with his cousin Sue
Bridehcad, a vivacious, intelligent young school teacher. Jude is
not able to express his love for Sue but he hovers about her in the
hope of getting her at one stage or other of bis life. She
marries an elderly school master Philloston but rinding him
intolerable she breaks away from her husband and flies to
Jude for shelter. They arc married though in doing so they
meet with social disapproval. Childien are born to them but
they all perish by a tragic fate. They are done because they
were too many. Sue in a state of agony and remorse returns to her
former husband Philloston. Jude starts drinking and is once
again enticed by Arabella Donn. He dies miserably.
After this novel Hardy turned from Novel writing to poetry.
In this novel Hardy ‘‘incensed convention il readers on less
than three grounds. In addition to sexual irregularities ^nd
utterly hopeless determinism he included a note of social
protest that had not been perceptible in his previous work
in which poverty was taken for granted as an unavoidable fact
of life.”*

Q. 75. Give your estimate of Ihomas Hardy as a NoveliNt.

Ans. Thomas Hardy was the last great novelist of the
Victorian age, though his work, as a poet and a story writer,
covers a few years of the twentieth century. He began his career
as a novelist at the insistence of lii:» wife Emma, who wanted to
see her husband’s name blazing in letters of gold in the galaxy of
British novelists. Acting according to his wife’s wishes. Hardy
launched on the unexplored region of novel writing and
achieved eminent success in his art. Posterity remembers him
as A novelist though he himself wanted to descend into annals
of literature as . a poet.

Hardy’s first experiment in novel writing was an utter
failure, and his two early works The Poor Mon and Didy and
Desperate Remedies were condemned in severe terms by George

' Lionel Stevenson • The Englibh Novel, a Panorama

( 113 )

Meredith. He received instructions from the sagacious master in
the technique of plot construction, and his later works were
acclaimed as successful experiments in fiction writing.

Hardy’s Range.

The range of Hardy’s novels was fairly wide. He was
interested in the presentation of conflict rising out of the impact
between the country surroundin and the new urban civilization,
reared on materialism and machinery. Hardy’s preference for the
old civilization of the countryside is well marked out in strong
contrast to the conflict and dissensions of modern advanced
civilization. Besides presenting the conflict between the old and
new ways of thinking, Hardy’s novels represent the problems ot
marriage and divorce in our society. His range covers social
problems particularly the problems of marriage, unhappy
wedlocks, divorces and love affairs. The helplessness of man under
the impelling force of destiny is also brought out with all its
grimness r,nd the novelist feels a sense of frustration in presenting
the unhappy lot of human beings swept away by the force of
destiny and fate. His subject is not men but man. His theme is
mankind’s predicament in the universe. At every moment in the
life of man a feeling of helplessness is presented bringing about
despair and grief in the life of his characters. The range of
Hardy’s novels inspite of the wide canvas covered by the novelist
is after all limited, ‘*The theatre of Hardy’s drama is built on a
large scale, but it is sparsely furnished. His range docs not allow
him to present the vast, varied panorama of human life that we
find in War and Peace* His scene is too narrow. The subtleties of
intellectual life, the complexities of public life, the sophistications
of social life-these do not kindle Hardy’s imagination to work."*
The truth is that Hardy’s range excludes the presentation
of the finer shades of civilised life ot the diversity of the human
scene as a whole. The life he portrays can be reduced to its basic
elements. People in Hardy's books are born, work hard for their
living, fall in love and die. They do not do anything else. Such a
life limits in its turn the range of their emotions. We come across
comedy, tragedy, and poetry in his novels, but they centre mostly
round rustic life, and fail to take into account the life of urban

• Lord David Cecil ; Thomis Hardy

{ 314 )

areas» and the sophisticated society of modern times.

As An Artist.

“It would be claimed for the Wessex novels of Thomas
Hardy” says Lascele Abercrombie, “that in them fiction has
achieved both style and substance that enable it to fulfil the
greatest functions oi art.” Hardy was a conscientious artist, and
believed that the novel should be as much of a whole as a living
organism, in which all component parts such as plot, dialogue,
character, scenery, arc fitly framed together, giving the impression
of a harmonious building. He achieved eminent success in his
mission of elevating fiction writing into a conscious art. There is
the stamp of the architect, that Hardy was, in his artistic produc-
tions. His novels are masterly works of art.

Hardy’s Theme and Plot Construction.

Great masters of English fiction have always realised the
importance of plot in a novel, and have cultivated the art of plot
construction in a remarkable way. Hardy was a lover of stories
from the days of his childhood and as he advanced in years and
became a literary artist, he realised more and more the importance
of story telling in his novels. Hardy laid great stress on the plot
or story of his novel, and reared the edifice in a skilful manner.
'He was an architect by profession, and left the impress of his
professional proficiency on his novels. There is an architectonic
quality in Hardy’s plot construction. The plots are well-knit
inspite of the presence of chance element and strange coincidences.
They are complex for there are many incidents and details, but
inspite of this complexity the compactness and unity of his plots
is not lost. Nothing is forced and the incidents are bound together
by a cause and effect relation-one incident arising out of a formei
and leading to a latter. In the words of Duffin, “Every novel is
an answer to the question. Given certain characters in certain
situations, and allowing for the irony ot fate what will happen—
what will become of them.” In this marshalling of events to an
ulterior purpose Hardy exhibits bis skill as an architect and a master
artist in plot construction.

Hardy’s plots are not simple. In the words of Cazamian,
“They grow out of elementary passions, ambition, greed, love,
jealousy and the thirst for ko'^wledge and the springs which move

( 315 )

them ate psychological. Hardy tends to shift the construction of
kis novels to the inner world : he writes a moral drama, shows
a conflict of contradictory wills guided themselves by feelings.”

Hardy’s plots are generally based on the following themes,
He presents stories of love, involving the love-affairs of the
principal characters. Jude, Tess, Eustacia Vye, Bathsheba, Everdene,
Troy, Oak, Grace Mulberry have their love affairs. Some of the
characters achieve success in their love affairs while others meet
with despair. Hardy presents in his novels the trials and tribula-
tions that come in the way of lovers.

Hardy presents in his plots the conflict between the old
rural civilization and the new urban civilization. Tragedy in his
novels rises from the influence of modern competitive civilization
on the primitive and simple life of the old world. The primitive
beliefs and manners of the old world people receive a rude shock
from the impact of the strange disease of modern life with its sick
hurry and divided aims, and misery follows in the wake of such
a conflict. The plot of Far From the Madding Crowds The Return
of the Native t The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Woodiande.rs^
Tess of the D'urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure is based on this
conflict between the old and the new world, between characters,
belonging to the countryside, and characters coining to rural life
from urban centres. Hardy’s preference in his novels is for the
countryside and rural surroundings. His novels bemoan the loss
of rustic simplicity and innocence of country life under the impact
of urban civilization.

Hardy’s Characters.

Hardy’s creative power is best exhibited in the portrayal of
characters. His range in characterisation is limited, and he
could draw only people belonging to the Wessex region.
Hardy for the first time in English literature has chosen peasant
types for bis heroes and heroines in a series of literary master-
pieces. The Wessex people are his ideals and when he leaves
them, he does like Dickens at his own peril. He has given us
convincing pictures of Wessex peasants, labourers, shepherds
and singers. His Wessex characters seem to be like elemental
forces on a background of vaster elemental forces. They are the
logical and natural expression of sleeply woodland places, gaunt

( 316 )

austere hills, purling streams, and solitary extensive landscapes.
When he attempts to portray characters from the higher aristo-
cratic life of the urban areas, he fails, and bis aristocratic charac-
ters like Lady Charmond and Lady Lucetta are not at all
convincing.

Hardy’s characters are emotional rather than intellectual.
J-Jc did not adopt the psychological method of character portrayal
which had been popularised by George Eliot and George Meredith.
He laid greater emphasis on the emotional side of his characters
than on their intellectual side. Bathsheba and Tess, Henchard
and Oak are emotional characters, and they leave an indelible
impression on our minds.

Hardy being a poet and a delineator of emotional charac-
ters achieved eminent success in the portrayal of lovers impelled
by passion and emotion. He has presented men and women in
love. Some of his characters, like Troy and Boldwood, Wildeve
and Angel Clare are passionate lovers exhibiting the fervour ot
their hearts in passionate speeches, while a good many of his
characters are quiet and reticent in matters of love like Elizabeth
Jane, Marty South, and Fanny Bobbin.

It is one of the peculiar features of Hardy’s characterisa-
tion that he presents good people with great admiration and
gusto, and condemns villains and sophisticated persons with a
sneering contempt. Hardy’s sympathy is always with good, noble,
and gentlehearted characters like Tess, Elizabeth Jane, Gabriel
Oak, and Venn, The Reddlemen. He has a distinct
dislike for shifty, cunning, and hypocritical characters like
Sergeant Troy, Dr. Fitzpiers, and Wildeve. He is seldom success-
tul in drawing odious people.

Hardy’s characters arc generally flat and belong to certain
types. His characters can be placed under certain groups, and
persons belonging to one group have a family likeness about them.
Hardy’s concern is with men in general, rather than with indivi-
dual man or woman. Classification and grouping is easily
possible in Hardy’s characters. In one group we place characters
who are noble, selfless, self-sacrificing, tender-hearted and uncomp
laining. To this group belong Gabriel Oak, Giles Winter-
borne, John Loveday, Diggory Venn, Marty Souths Elizabeth

( 317 )

Jane, Tess. In another group we have characters who are dashing^
:>parkling, vivacious, cunning, shifty, and fickle minded. To this
group belong such characters as Troy, Wildeve, Dr. Fitzpicrs,
Alec D’urbervilles, Eustacic Vye, Mrs. Charmond, Lucetta, Lady
Constantine. To these basic types is added a group of characters
who are intellectual snobs like Angel and Knight.

It is to be observed that the good, noble and gentle charac-
ters of Hardy belong to the country surroundings. In his convic-
tion the rural and the countryside has the capacity of producing
noble, gentle, and good hearted souls. City life, with all its
sophistications, has a baneful efTect on human character and is
likely to produce shifty, cunning and hypocritical characters.
This preference of Hardy for his rusric and country-bred
characters is well marked out in his novel.

Hardy has given a rich picture of human character in his
novels. He has drawn men as well as women with remarkable
skill. It is necessary to make a few observations about Hardy’s
men and women characters.

Hardy’s male characters are vivid, passionate, emotional
and impulsive. They usually suffer from indecision. They are
t-ometimes the victims of passion and sometimes of stern
determination. They sometimes exhibit valour and vitality, and
on other occasions effiminacy and moral depravity, Hardy’s
male characters are real human beings, men of Hesh and blood,
and in their portrayal he brings the disinterested objectivity of a
detached observer of life. He pictures all classes of male chara-
cters. Wc have selfless, noble, gentle, kindhearted and serviceable
men like Gabirel Oak, Diggory Venn, and Giles Winterborne;
bold, shifty, cunning and hypocritical characters like Troy,
Wildeve, Fit^piers and Alec. There are men like Hcnchard who
are brave and heroic, and persons like Bold wood who arc
passionate and stormy.

Hardy’s skill is best exhibited in the presentation of
temale characters. He is another John Ford in this direction.
^‘Profound as is his comprehension of human nature at large”
«ays Duffin, “it is in the female personality that be is most
marvellously learned.” He has unfolded feminine characters

( 318 )

with all their subtlety, emotionalism, and passionate ardour in
his novels.

DufFin has classified Hardy’s women characters in three
groups. The first group includes full-length portraits of women
who are of a higher order of personality e. g. Teas, Sue, Eustacia,
Bathsheba and Elizabeth Jane. The second group also consists
of full-length study of women, but they have less personal
significance e. g. Ethelberta, Elf ride, Grace, Mulberry, Viviettc,
Anne. The third group includes women of much less significance
e. g., Lucetta, Arabella, Tamsie, Many South, Paula, Fancy
Picotel,

It is to be noted that Hardy’s preference is for women who
belong to the country side. The finest qualities of women are
developed and cultivated in rural surroundings. City women are
sophisticated, cunning, and hypocritical. Tess, Elizabeth Jane,
and Marty South are noble and gentle because they have been
reared in the rural surroundings far away from the sick hurry
and divided aims of modern life. Eustacia Vye, Grace Mulberry,
Lucetta have been spoilt by their contact with the artificial and
sophisticated life of the cities.

There is a category among Hardy’s characters which
may be called 'chorus’ characters, the groups of rustics which in
his greatest works form, as it were, the chorus of the main drama.
They always appear in a group and never separately. They make
observations about life and the activities of his characters. They
are moralists at.heart and carping in their criticism.

Hardy’s attitude towards Life-His Pessimism and Philosophy.

Hardy was primarily an artist, and as an artist, it was his
ambition to present his impressions of life in a detached and
objective manner. He did not favour the idea of being called a
philosopher, though philosophic ideas are found scattered in all
his novels. He did not follow any preconceived pattern of
philosophy that could be related to any particular school of
thought. He was happy if he was called an artist and an impre-
ssionist, recording his impressions of life in his novels. Hardy,
in fact, considered a novel as a work of impressionism rather than
philosophy. In the preface to Tess of the D' Urbervilles he says,
"A novel is an impression, not an argument. A t..le teller writes

( 319 )

down bow th'? things of the world strike him without any
intentions whatever/' Hardy's novels are impressions that the
novelist gathered from life.

Several influences worked effectively in the formation of Hardy’s
impressions about life. Hardy's ill-health, the morbidity
of his temper, and his general inclinatim towards the funeral
side of things determined his melancholy and pessimistic outlook
and impressions about life. Added to these personal peculiarities
of his temperament, were the external factors of his age and the
times in which he lived. The rapid advance of industrial life
destroying the serenity of country surroundings, and the general
acceptance of the Darwinian Theory of Evolution striking a smash-
ing blow at old religious convictions, coloured Hardy’s thoughts
and considerably modified his way of looking at life and its
problems. Such thoughts as the following began to flash through
Hardy's mind — *Tf, as seemed possible, it (world) was only a
mechanical process evolving from no one knew whither, what was
the significance of those moral and spiritual values which he had
learned to regard as the most precious things in life ? If
Christianity was not true, what became of the conception of
Divine Justice bringing all to good in the end.”

Considerably impressed by the above stated influences in
his mental outlook. Hardy approached life and its varied visions.
He cast aside the romantic and the roseate view of life. He viewed
life in a realistic manner. He did not look at life through the
many coloured glass of romance or of fancy, but in the spiiit of
a detached observer, accepting without any dismay what life
really unfolded to him. It is this realistic approach to life that
we find in Hardy's novels.

Hardy's vision of life is certainly not very attractive and
glamorous. He did not find success, jollity, hopefulness, and
ruddy optimism among the people whom he witnessed, and
with whom his lot was cast. He came across despair, dejection,
1 allure, frustration in human life. He noticed plenty of tragedy
in the life of Wessex people who were poor, dependent, and ignor-
ant. He found them exposed to the oppressions of the social
system, the caprice of weather and "The President of the
Immortals’’ every now and then undoing their lives. This is what

( 320 )

. . > !

Kacdy saw, and this is what is actually f resented in his
norels.

His attitude towards life is pessimistic and gloomy in the
sense that almost in all his tragic novels like, Tess Mayor oj
Casterbrid^e, Jude the Obscure, and The Return of the Native we
come across pictures of despair and dejection, of hopes unful-
filled, and plans uncarried out. Man proves feeble before chance,
fate or destiny that so often comes to vitiate man*s plans and
schemes. Hardy considers men and women as mere puppets
in the hands of a mocking fate which is relentless in ics blind
justice. He believes in Omar Khayyam’s lines about destiny ;

The Moving Finger writes ; and having writ
Moves on ; nor all thy piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line
Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it-

Again and again in Hardy’s novels we view the spectacle
of misery and suffering for human beings. Man proposes and
God disposes stands true in all his works. The tragedy of human
life is enacted in all its grimness, for somehow or other, destiny,
fate, divinity stands completely opposed to man’s noble plans and
schemes. Hardy sees the working of a malignant power and an
immanent will pitted against frail human beings spilling disaster
and distress in their lives. He feels that some vast Imbecility
mighty to build and blind and impotent to tend has framed us
in jest and is playing a cruel game with man’s life. Everywhere
in his hovels human beings appear to be crusheid by this power
which is indifferent, callous and hostile to man. He considers
that gods are opposed to human beings, and it is their pleasure
that men and women should suffer, and meet with hard knocks
and blows in life. He upholds the Greek view of life according to
which the gods are cruel and heartless and kill men for their sport.
Hardy presents with firm conviction the working of it sinister
intelligence in the affairs of human beings, and reiterates with
a firm force what Shakespeare had stated —

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods
They kill us for their sport.

Hardy fails to see any justification in Browning’s obser-
vations about God and the goodness of human life, tn Tess

( 321 )

Hardy controverts Browning’s earlier statement about God and
his wise dispensation of the Universe, and makes one of bis
characters remark —

God’s not in the Heaven
Airs wrong with the world.

The picture of life in Hardy’s novels is thus gloomy and
pessimistic. He does not find happiness in human life and in the
concluding part of The Mayor of Casterbridge^ he makes the
pregnant observation through the mouth of Ellizabeth Jane that,
**Happines8 is an interlude in a general drama of pain,” Happi-
ness in human life is an oasis which is easily submerged by the
swirling waves of agonies, sorrows and sufferings. Through the
wide canvas of his works we notice the shadows of darkness and
sombreness pervading the entire scenes of his novels. There is
suffering every where in the world and the virtuous as well as
the vicious share it —

To each his suffering : all are men
Condemned alike to groan
The tender for another* s pain
The unfeeling for his own.

Striking the keynote of Hardy’s general impression and
attitude towards life, Duffin nicely remarks •“Take it as you will,
accept or reject, like or dislike-his opinion, a hundred times
expressed and everywhere implied, is that life is a lost, inglorious
and bloody battle, a wide deep sea of misery with but a very
few flowering islands, a gift so powerful that it were almost a
wise man’s part to refuse it altogether.”’!^

To him life docs not hold out any charna and he knows
what life has in store for human beings. In his poem To Life
Hardy makes his vision of life very clear. He says —

O, Life with the sad sacred face
I weary ^ of seeing thee.

/ know what thou wouldst tell
Of Death, Time, Destiny —

I have known ft long, and know, too well.

What it all means for me.

Hardy’s attitude towards life is undoubtedly possiaiistic
! Thomas |{ardy.

( 32 ^ f

and gloomy. He holds out no hope fot human beings. But his
peisiinism is not depressing, for he exhorts them to struggle and
fight against the decrees of fate and cruel destiny, rather than
make a 'v^'cak kneed surrender to the majesty of the sinister and
malignant power governing the universe. Hardy is of the view
that it is man's lot to suffer and meet with defeat and dejection
in his life, but inspite of this inevitable fate, man should strive
and struggle and fight against untoward circumstances that may
come in his life. He should go down fighting in a brave and
heroic spirit. This attitude towards life is being presented by
Hardy through the character of Henchard in the Mayor of
Caaterhridge, where the Mayor struggles and fights against the
decrees of fate throughout his life though he ultimately meets
his tragic end.

Hardy is not for intellectual cowards and invalids. His
pessimism will be depressing to those who are morally and
intellectually incapable of standing shocks in life. Hardy is not
complacent in his attitude. He docs not supinely give way to the
cheap optimistic feeling that ‘some how good will be the final
goal of ill.’ He is a sturdy realist who takes life at its face
values, and what actually is the state of affairs in the world.
He considers it simply wish fulfilment to indulge in cheap
optimism, when the forces of evil, sadness and despair overpower
us on all sides. It is foolish and unwise for anybody to be an
optimist when he sees the conditions of life in a realistic and
faithful light. Such is the realistic vision of life unfolded by
Hardy in his novels. He is a pessimist, but his pessimism is
more satisfying than the cheap optimism of some thinkers who
hesitate to call a spade a spade, and gloss over the realities of
life by a thin veneer of superficial optimism. Hardy’s philosophy
and sturdy realism will enable human beings to drive away
day dreaming and come to the realities of a hard and stern world.
Hardy brings home to us to view life realisticatly as it is
without expecting too much from the world, its controller and
his created beings.

Hardy always impresses upon his readers that it is mere
lolly to seek happiness at the hands of Destiny or {’rovidsnce.
Man must depend on himseljf and learn to- face the vldssitude

( , 3^3 )

of fortune ia a bijavc and l^etoic manner. “Abind(>n;;i by God,
treated with scorn by Nature, man lies htlplcssly at the mercy^ of
tjio?e purblind doomsters, — accident, chance and time from
which he has had to endure injury and insult from the cradle to
the grave/'* J^et him face his destiny bravely.

Though Hardy arraigns and accuses God of imbecility and
malignancy, yet he is not harsh and bitter against human beings.
He is not a cynic like Swift nor a castigator of man like Webster.
He has infinite sympathy for human beings crushed under the
wheels of an overpowering fate. Hardy exhorts his readers to be
sympathetic to the victims of social injustice and inequality
and pleads feelingly for those who have to suffer the blows of
fate and society in a rapacious manner. He impresses on his
re*»ders not to indulge in condemnation of their fellowmcn even
when they are weak and yield to temptation of the world. His
philosophy is thus based on a sympathtic and catholic attitude
towards life and is surely one of the finest fruits of literary
culture in modern times.”

Hardy, himself, did not like to be dubbed as a pessimist:,
but a meliorist. Hardy seems to have winced at the suggestion
of pessimism in his thought. He has answered the charge of
pessimism in the following words:

“People call me a pessimist ; and if it is pessimism to
think, with Sophocles, that ‘not to have been born is best/ then
I do not reject the designation. I never could understand why
the word ‘pessimism’ should be such a red rag to many worthy
people ; and I believe, indeed, that a good deal of the robustious
swaggering optimism of recent literature is at bottom cowardly
and insincere. I do not see that we are likely to improve the
world by asseverating, however loudly, that black as white, or at
leaQt that black is but a necessary contrast and foil, without
which white would be white no longer. That is mere juggling
with a metaphor. But my pessimism, if pessimism it be, does not
involve the assumption that the world is going to the dogs, and
that Ahriman is winning all along the line. On the contrary,
my practical philosophy is distinctly meliorist.” Hardy expresses
his own theory about pessimism in these words : “As to pessi-

EdRiuod Com s Hardy.

( 324 )

mism, tny motto is ; first correctly ^iiagnosc the complaint— in
this case, the human ills — and ascertain the cause : then set
about finding a remedy if one exists. The motto or practice of
the optimists is : Blind the eyes to the real malady, and use
empirical panaceas to suppress the symptoms. My View is to find
a remedy for the ills if one can easily do so.” These words
of Hardy’s sound satisfying and heartening. If things are
what they are, why should we not face them without any
illusion ?

Hardy’s treatment of Nature.

Nature has always exercised a fascinating influence on the
minds of poets right from the time of Chaucer co our own days. The
Romantic Revival in England produced a number of nature wor*
shippers, the chief of them being Wordsworth, who applauded
Nature’s holy plans and considered her a gentle and kind mother.
He took nature as his guide, nurse and sheet anchor of life.
There is not a word of criticism against nature in Wordsworth.

Hardy’s attitude towards nature is quite the opposite of
Wordsworth. Hardy does not regard nature as a kind and
generous mother. For Hardy nature is the agent of cruelty
and" destruction. She has no sympathy for human beings. For
him all the resourcefulness, ail the beauty, all the charms, all
the bewitching powers of Nature arc for the destruction of man.
Hardy thinks that Nature is insensible to the feelings of man,
and finds a sort of fiendish delight in slaying simple human
beings. Egdon Heath is the terrible spot where many lives are
crushed. The virginity of Tess is ravished by Alec in the very lap
of nature and not a word of protest is heard against the act by
nature. Hardy complaining asks —

^'Darkness and silence ruled everywhere around. Above
them rose the primeval yews and oaks of the chase. "About them
stole the hopping rabbits and hare. But, might some say, where
was Tess’s guardian angel ? Where was the providence of her
simple faith ?”

Lord David Cecil makes Hardy’s attitude towards nature
quite clear in his admirable study of Hardy. He 8ays-^^*Howcvef,
Hardy’s attitude to Nature was not Wordsworthian. Ha dil not
believe that Nature has any holy plan or healing power^ Being

( 325 )

influeneed by the theory of Evolution, he found much in Nature
that was cruel and antagonistic to man.

Nature has been used in several capacities by Hardy in) his
novels. The influence of nature on humanity has been presented
in different ways in his novels. Nature influences the moods and
actions of Hardy’s human characters. To understand the self-
sacrificing love of Marty South, we must realise the spell of the
brooding woods, the magic of the quiet, lenduring trees whose
life she knew so well. The strange, unearthly feeling of early
morning to Clare in proximity to Tess; the tense, boring atmos-
phere while Gabriel Oak works to save Bathsheba’s ricks from
burning — these and many other scenes show natural aspects
working on the mood of the persons and through them on the
mood of the readers. ^ The influence of nature on human beings is
best illustrated in The woodlanders. Under the Greenwood Tree^
Far From the Madding Crowd, The Mayor of Casterhridge and
The Return of the Nntive

In most of his Nature scenes. Hardy presents an cm ttio'ial
connection between nature and human beings. Sometimes nature
is affected by human emotions, and sometimes man is allected by
nature’s feelings. In Tess we notice a change in nature’s feelings
in accordance with the emotional change in Tess’s life. With the
progressive wreck of Tess’s happiness there is also a symbolic
change in the climates and atmospheres of the places where she
goes, from the secluded vale of Blackmoor to the silent vale of
the Great Dairies, the bleak chalk table-land of Fintcombe-Ash,
fashionable sandybowre and at last the Great Plain and the Druid
temple of Stonehenge. In the Return of the Native, Egdon Heath
influences the emotions and feelings of the characters. The Heath
imparts a tragic gloom to the characters of the novel. The Heath
is employed to create the feelings of terror among the characters
of the novel. In fact, nature enters too much in the moods and
emotions of human beings in Hardy’s novels. Lord David Cecil
very nicely puts this inter-relation of man and nature in Hardy’s
novels in the following words— “Nature, first of all, played a
larger part in Hardy’s books than in those of any other English
novelist. It is not just tht background in his drama, but a leading
' Lord David Cecil: Thomas Hsrdy

( ^526 )

character in it. Sometimes, it exercises an active idfluendfe on the
course of events; more often it is a spiritual agent, colouring the
mood and shaping the disposition of human beings. The huge
black darkness of E^don Heath dominates the lives of the
character in The Return of the Native infusing into, them its
grandeur and its melancholy. His most living characters, more-
over, are always natures of the country side. Farmers and
shepherds, thatchers and hedgers, they most o* them, never stray
beyond its borders.'’

Whatever may be the relation between man and nature in
Hardy’s novels, it cannot be denied that the pictures of nature
drawn by the novelist in his novels arc graphic, vivid, and exhibit
is intense love for the external beauties of nature. Hardy has left
innumerable descriptions of birds, grass, flowers, gardens, ‘bridges,
sunset, in his novels. Hs has perception both for the finer shades
as well as the solemn harmonies of nature. His acute sense of
observation and keen reception of the sounds of nature can be
felt in all his novels. His landscapes and pictures of nature, both
in its inanimate and animate aspects, exhibit the dexterous hand
of a skilled artist and a meticulous painter. He combines the
method of general broad line painting with the art of minute
and accurate painting in his novels. ^*He has lovingly described
the elementary, and grand aspects of Nature; the land which
appeals to him most is that which is freest from human dwellings.
He loves to paint the wood, where the seasons go through the
infinitely varied circle of rich pastures, the sober hills of his
native district; the bare uplands where the furrow of a Roman
road runs straight and empty to the horizon; the gloomy vastness
of the moor in which every living vanishes as if swallowed up in
the depths of the centuries whose image is called by its
immobility.’'

Hardy’s Humour.

Hardy was a writer of tragedies and from such a writer we
cannot expect pleasant and genial humour like that of Goldsmith,
fie cannot tickle us to broad laughter like Dickens. He cannot be
placed in the category of great humorists like Dickens and
Thackeray. The humour that runs through his work is of. a grim

( 327 )

and ghastly kind. Thcfc ks a note of bitterness in Hardy’s novels.
^Occupying less space but more characteristic, arc his flashes of
satiric, humour, sometimes grim and occasionally ghastly. Here
aird there is a delicate, evanescant smiled His humour has not
the society grace, nor often the artistic point of finish of Meredith;
but it always rings true, and is never gross, coarse or vulgar

Mostly humour in Hardy’s novels rises from his rustic
characters. They create humour out of their ignorance. In A Pair
of Blue Eyes, there is pleasant humour whea the driver of coach
^ays that, “If there could be a George IV, there should also be a
Charles IV for Charleses are as common as Georges.” Rustic
humour also rises when Ctecdle and Crawtree indulge in mirthful
talks in The Woodlanders^ The remarks of Mother (3uJtom and
Solomon Longways on the ‘cannibal deal’ of Christopher Conney
in the Mayor of Casterbridge are particularly humorous. ‘'Wc
are made to laugh at the immemorial butts of village life — garru-
lous, reminiscent old grand fathers, henpecked husbands, ludicrous,
timid simpletons, and the incongruity between the facts of life
and the countryman's ignorant comment on them.”**

The bitterness and satiric force of Hardy’s humour can be
seen in' his death scenes and funerals. ^ There is a grim
humour in the remark that Sue's children in Jude the Obswe
died “because they were too many,” The death of Jude Fawlcy
and Michael Henchard are instinct with ghastly and bitter kind of
humour and irony.

Hardy’s view of death.

Hardy does not believe in life after death. He finds no
evidence of a conscious state after death. He docs not hold out a
land of bliss to the virtuous dead. All that virtuous people should
expect is to live in the memory of some persons after their exit
irom the world. Dead persons can continue to live in the fragrant
memory of those who are in some way related to the dead. No
one should fear death fdr it marks the end of all miseries and
sufferings in the world:

Of comfort no man speak

Let's talk of grmes^ of worms and epitaphs

Duffin : Thomas Hardy.

’ • Lord David Cec 1 : Thomas Hardy,

( 328 )

Make dust our paper ^ and with rah y eyes

Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.

Hardy’s irttltoide tawards marriage and love.

Hardy deals with'thc problems of marriage and love in two
of bis novels Tess of the D^urhervilles and Jude the Obscure. The
problem of marriage is sct*out with great force. In Hardy’s view
love at first sight docs not very much help in making life happy.
Marriages that are the result of love at first sight generally end in
unhappiness. Marriages should be performed after matured consi-
deration. The two people should study and understand each
other before they rush into marriage. It is only by thoughtful
consideration that marriages ought to be cemented. However,
when married life becomes irksome or unhappy for anyone of the
partners, each one must have the right to divorce the other. Man
or woman must have the right to free himself or herself from his
or her partnership in case it is impossible to carry on well in the
married state of life. In the Mayor of Casterbridge Hardy puts
his viewpoint in the conversation that takes place between Susan
and H6nchard. ^"The conversation took a high turn, as it often
docs on such occasions. The ruin of good men by bad wives, and
more particularly, the frustrating of many a promising youth’s
high aims and hopes and the extinction of his energies, by an early
imprudent marriage was the theme.”

In one of his famous prefances Hardy writes, •‘A marriage
should be dissolved as soon as it becomes a cruelty to either of the
parties, being essentially no marriage.” Hardy insisted on breaking
the bond of marriage if it fails to make the couple happy.

Hardy's style.

‘‘Hardy’s style is essentially of the philosophic type, an

immanence of his mind And his style is grey — grey as

November skies on Odysseus’ sullen seas. The Hardy atmosphere
is chiefly due to his style : it breathes in every paragraph and it h

as recognisable and characteristic as the scent of the salt ocean

Hardy’s style thus satisfies the first demand that all styles are called
upon to fill — it perfectly corresponds with and expresses the pro-
fouodest intention of the writer. It is not conspicuously beautiful,
it is not luxurious or alluringly harmonious^ it is in the ittsip a, bare
significant narrative style of easy but not obtrusive balance. His

( 329 )

Style is the mirror of his profoandest self/’* ‘He is al>vay$ grea^
when some great occasion is presented/ Like Shakespeare, he cai^
vary his style with the variation of his themes.

Hardy, a modern novelist.

As a novelist Hardy belongs to that group ot realists who.
would eliminate every trace of freedom whereby an individual be-
comes responsible for his acts. As a novelist typical of n>odern
times Hardy loves the complexity ot things, clash of principles and
motives and the encounter of temperaments. The issues he deals
with are great but not clear. There is a sense of entanglement.
Right and wtong> courage and cowardice, duty and desire, are pre-
sented to us in confused conflicts. “It is no mere transcript of
life at a certain time and place that Hardy has given us. It is a
vision of the world and of man’s lot as they revealed themselves
to a powerful imagination, a profound and poetic genius, a gentle
and humane soul”.**

* H; C Daffin^Thomat Sardy*

• • Vlfiioia Woolf ; Tae Novell of Thomts Hardy.

20lli Ceolur^r Literature

Q. 76. Give a brief account of the social, political, economic
and literary tendencies of the twentieth century, the age of
interrogation.

Ans. The Victorian era came to a close in 1900. The dawn
of the twentieth century witnessed the emergence of new values
in the field of ^ocial, politic dl, economic and literary life. Compton*
Rickett has pointed out three prominent features of the new age.
(1) *‘Its reiteration of the old Revolutionary formula of Liberty,
Equality and Fraternity in a new ^ctting (2) Its worship ot
Power rather than Beauty — here it parts company abruptly with
the age of the Romantic Revival and the Victorian age. (3) Its
challenging attitude of the elder values in Art and Life — this to
.^ome extent is true also of the age preceding, but the challenging
attitude is more persistent, more searching to-day.”* .

Besides these three prominent tendencies in our times, we
find the literature and life of the modern age governed more by
realism than by romance. The present age is essentially the age
of realism and the modern writers, instead of dealing with the
times of king Arthur and the Middle ages, have concentrated their
attention on the problems of modern life. The realism of the
modern age has further been accentuated by the growing upsurge
of scientific discoveries. The new inventions and discoveries have
brought a transformation in the old romantic values of life and
have given a materialistic twist to whatever is considered sacred
and valuable in life. This rapid growth of science and materialism
and deification of machine has brought about a commercialisation
of art, literature and music and the modern age is rightly branded
as the commercial age of the world. In the world of today
religion and spiritualism are on the wane and everywhere mate-
rialism is i^ the ascendancy. Many poets and novelists have felt
disgpsted.'iwith the growing cult of materialism,, and their works

* Ceaiflioo-Rk^ History of Eaglbb Literature.

( 33t )

arc marked with a note of revolt against this advancing tide of
the modern times. Butler and Huxley are the prominent writers
of the modern age, who have attacked in their works the modern
craae for materialism and machinery. These great authors have
exposed the weaknesses of the system based on the warship of
machinery.

The age of machinery has brought about not only a feeling of
revolt among the writers of our times but has also created a feeling
of pessimism and frustration in them. Gissing felt awefuUy dis'
gusted with modern industrial life and his novels arc an attack
upon the industrialism of the age. Being disgusted with the
humdrum existence of modern life many authors have chosen to
retire to the countryside where they seek to find refuge from the
rattle and bustle of modern cities. In modern literature there is
a growing attack on the dirtiness, seediness and squalor of cities.
The seediness of modern life has found expression in the novels
of James Joyce and Graham Greene. John Masefield has given
expression to the dirtiness of modern trade and commerce in
his famous poem Cargoes, He contrasts the beauty and
romance of the past with the dirtiness and squalor of modern
life in the last stanza of the poem.

The growing tide of materialism has brought about the
disintegration of family relationship and authority. Samuel
Butler in The Way of All Flesh expressed the revolt of youth
against the authority of parents. D. H. Lawrence has also raised
his voice against the old Victorian authority and has pleaded for
the freedom ot the individual. Sex life is no longer eschewed, but
finds vigorous treatment in his works.

During the twentieth century there has been a rapid
progress of education. Educational facilities are available to all
classes of people. Literacy has gone up and with it has come
the greater love for the study of books. The rapid progress of
education has brought about enormous output of books. In our
times books are published endlessly and many inferior writers
have started making money by their prolific pen. The sacrifice
of art to business is a sorry spectacle of modern life.

In modern times literature has been employed for social
purposes, particularly for reforming the festering sores and

( 332 )

fnaladks of contemporary society. Modern literature is charac-
terized by propaganda, and through this medium dramatists have
discussed social problems. *‘More than ever before would be
reformers pinned their faith on the printed word and on the serious
theatre as media for social propaganda, and the problem or dis-
cussion play and the novel of social purpose may be described as
two of the typical products of the period.***

In modern literature the novel has become the dominant
literary form and it is through the medium of this important
instrument of literature that social problems have been very nicely
dealt. “In addition, the novel is admirably suited as a vehicle for
the sociological studies which attracted most of the great artists
of the period. The modern novelist is not only interested in
social problems but is also equally well inclined to discuss psycho-
logical problems of the modern age.’* “He is no longer content
with his old magic faculty of entering into their consciousness; he
now enters into unconsciousness; the better to express the irra-
tionality and disconnectedness of their mental processes, he may
abandon syntax altogether and merely jot down disjoined
phrases, unrelated words or inarticulate grunts to express their
sensations.”**

' In modern literature drama has once again witnessed a
remarkable revival after an age-old slumber and obscurity to
vhich it had fallen after the eighteenth century. In the hands of
Galsworthy, Bernard Shaw, Barker, T. S. Eliot, drama has made
rapid progress in the twentieth century.

The pre-war years were the years of the novel and the
drama and there was a relative eclipse of poetry. Modern poetry
i$ not so significant and rich as modern novel and drama. ^ A. C
Ward characterises modern poetry as puerile. Poetry was revived
after an early period of stagnation by Yeats and a few other poets
of the age. “The demand, long before expressed by Yeats, for a
new and living poetical tradition was met between the wars in his
own work and in that of the new poets — T. S* Eliot, W. H. Auden,
Cecil Da) Lewis and Louis Macniece. Poetry again became a vital
literary from in close touch with life, and if it did not oust the

* £. A.'bert . history of Eosliah Litoralore.

( 333 )

nov^cl from its primacy, it certainly outstripped the drama,”*

New experiments were tried in all branches of literature.
The traditional forms were thrown out and in their place new
literary experiments were made in the field of poetry, drama and
novel. *‘lt is doubtful whether any period of English literature
saw experiments so bold and various as those of the inter-war
years. A natural corollary for the quest for new values and for
a new vital tradition was the desire for new forms and methods of
presentation and all the major literary genres of the age produced
revolutionary developments.”

Twentieth century English literature has considerably been
tnfluenced by foreign artists in the field of drama, poetry, and
fiction. The influence of Ibsen on modern drama has been
profound in the sphere of form, matter and stage-craft. The
influence of Ramain Rolland, Dostoievsky and Flaubert is clearly
perceptible in the modern novel. The philosophical theories of
Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud have coloured the fiction of
James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Charles Morgan,

Albert^ Kisti^iy of English Literature

Twentieth Century Novel

Q. 77. What are the tendencies in modern English Navel ?

Ans. The modern age is essentially the age of the novel.
Hugh Walpole regards the twentieth century as an age of great
novels rather than novelists. In his opinion, “It has been a period,
however, of novels rather than novelists.” No doubt there arc
great novels of perennial interest in out times which can
be favourably compared with the novels of the eacliet ages, but
the novelists who have penned them cannot in any way be ignored.
The modern age has produced great novelists like Henry James,
H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, Joseph Conrad,
D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, Virginia Woolt
and great novels like The Way of AH Flesh. Old Wives* Tale,
Forsyte Saga, Tono Bungay, Lord Jim, The Razor*s Edge, Point
Counter Point, A Passage to India, Analysis, Pilgrimage, To the
Lighthouse etc. Though the novel had made phenomenal progress
during the Victorian age, yet it could not achieve that excellence
which it has attained in the hands of the aforesaid novelists.
The novel has gained an ascendancy over other art forms in the
modern age, and from a technical point of view, the progress of
the last sixty years is unequalled in all its previous history-
One gets the feeling after reading a few novels of the modern age
that the field coveted by modern novelists is vast and varieg-
ated, and the currents and cross-currents sweeping through
modern fiction are so forceful and powerful that one is likely
to be swept of his feet and lost in the swirling flow of the
stream. The modern novel has travelled on diverse paths
leading to different directions, and some pointing to no desti-
nation at all. We ace confronted by different schools of fiction,
different types of novels, different techniques of plot construction
and characterisation, and different angles of approaching the
problems of modern life. Referring to the multitudinous changes
in the subject matter, form, technique, and style in twentieth
century fiction J. B. Priestley says, “If we are asked' what

( 335 )

nas been happening to the English novel during this pet^od, we
arc tempted to reply, “Everything, and to let it go at that.”

Before we examine the various tendencies and trends in
twentieth century fiction it would be desirable to have an idea of
the great jaovelists and the periods to which they belong. The
jarlier years of the twentieth century witnessed the flowering ot
a few great novelists like Henry James, Samuel Butler, George
:Hssing, John Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett, Joseph Conrad and
II. G. Wells. Since the greater part of their work was done
Juring the reign of Edward VII, they arc technically known as
the Edwardians. After that we have the Georgian period extending
ivcr twenty five years, and during this period we have several
prominent novelists such as J. B. Priestley. Frank Swinnerton,
Kugh Walpole, Somerset Maugham, Charles Morgan, Compton
Mackenzie. R. H. Mottram, J. C. Powys. They are all Georgian
novelists. Then came a succession of novelists who looked with
:;yes of disfavour on the growth of the novel under the leadership
)f the Edwardians and the Georgians. Among these are
Mdous Huxley, James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair
ind Virginia Woolf. They all developed psychological trends
ind satirical exposure of early Edwardian materialism. From
.939 — 1966, came a new set of novelists with different outlook
ind approach on life. Graham Greene, Henry Green, F. L.
'Trcen, Joyce Cary, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Elizabeth Bowen arc
the prominent among post-war novelists. “Where, however, all
hese post-war novelists fail to live up to the standards by the
^rcat writers of the past'’ says Gilbert Phelps in The Ntvel Today^
‘is not in their subject matter, but in their lack of artistic detach-
nent and control. They arc to > emotionally committed to the
legative values they seek to illustrate : their attitudes are ambiva*
eat and in consequet\ce their characters and situations are not
ally fcfilizcd.'*

The twentieth century novelists have laid great stress on
he art form of the novel. They have shov^n great conscious-
less of form. The modern novelist bas rejected the irrelevancies
>f the Victorians, their moralisings, and direct appeal to the 'dear
’eadet’ of the story. Modern novels ate not loose and rambling
ike the novels of Dickens and Thackeray, but have a compactness

( 336 )

of their own. The modern novel has, '*few frills, few redundancies
it is more like a well-cut garden than an opulent tropical jungi^
which the novel undoubtedly was in the hands of Dickens and
lhackeray,”

In the first few decades of the twentieth century, the novci
was mainly confined to the discussion of , problems confronting
in social life. The Edwardian novel was essentially a novel of idea^
including in its scope a free discussion of all kinds of ideas
scientific, social, political, industrial and so forth. The Edwardiar
novelists considered it to be a sin to escape into a world ot
romance and psychology when the gaping wounds of social litc
were clamouring for r^*form and healthy treatment. H. G. Wells
Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett particularly concentrated their atten
tion to the social problems of their times and made the novel ar
instrument of social propaganda. In their hands novel became
purposive in character. It had a definite social purpose and aimed
at the solution of social problems, domestic problems, and
problems rising out of the stress and storm of economic life
H. G. Wells gave a fervent expression to the social character oi
the Edwardian novel in the following words— novel is ir
essence a discursive thing, a waxen tapestry of multifariom
interest sufficiently elastic in form to take the whole of life withir
its compass-business, finance, and politics, till ic becomes s
proper medium for canvassing all social and political problems a^
they arc.’’ The concentration of these novelists was mainly on thi
problems of middle and upper middle classes, for many of then
had sprung from the middle class life.

H. G. Wells discussed the problems of modern educatio
in Joan and Peter and The History of Mr, Polly and elcposed th(
educational imposture of the present day society. He advocatec
social reform in the field of education. Wells attacked moderr
commercial practices and fraudulent advertisement in Tono Bunge)
and sympathetically presented the problems of the servam
employed in business bouse in Kipps and Th^ History of Mr
Polly, Galsworthy pointed his attention to the conflict betweer
materialism, philistinism and cultural values in Forsyte SagOf anc
advocated a reorientation of ou look for the proper appreciatior
of the values of life.

( 337 )

One result of this preoccupation with the problems of life
was to give to Edwardian fiction the colour and touch of
Realism^ which the Victorians under the influence of Dickens and
Thackeray had so very well employed in their works. H. G. Wells
ccalistically presented the sorrows and sufferings of draper's
assistants in Kipps and Hr, Polly, George Moore, the Irish
novelist, made a realistic study of the poorer classes in our society
in his A Modern Lover » A Mummer* s Wife, Spring Days and
Esther Waters. In the last novel he presented a close and realistic
study of the lower and more -sordid sides of life with great
sympathy for the underdogs of society. George Gissing focussed
his attention on the life of the poor people, and realistically
presented their woes and sufferings in a pathetic vein in Thysa,
The Nether World, Grub Street and the Private Papers of Henry
Ryecrafu Arnold Bennett realistically portrayed the life of the
Five Towns in The Old Wives* Tale and Clayhanger, He cast aside
the trappings of romance, and concentrated all his attention
to the presentation of the grim, ugly, and sordid life of the
industrial districts. He succeeded in realistically portraying
the society, the streets, the houses of the Five Towns by heaping
minute details to produce a cumulative effect. In Riceyman
Steps he concentrated on the sordid life of a miser, Henry
Barlforward, a bookseller, lost in the craze of money making.
In the Imperial Palace, he presented all the details of hotel life.
John Galsworthy in the Forsyte Saga presented Victorian
materialism and lust for property. He brought out realistically
the full picture of Victorian life led by an upper middle class
society in all its bearings. As the social historian of the passing
away of Victorian Galsworthy was without a serious rival.
He brought out realistically their code of honour, snobbishness
and distrust of passion. Forsyte Saga is a complete picture of
the upper middle class society soaked in the wine of miterialism
and money.

Against this tendency of realism and materialism perceptible
in the early years of the twentieth century wfth an accent on the
discussion of social problems, stands the tendency for criticism of
material Values, and a love for romance and adventure. The note
of disillusionment against modern realism in fiction and too much

( 338 )

engrossment with material values of life was sounded by the
psychological novelists of the age such as Dorothy Richardsop
and Virginia Woolf, and by a few critics of modern life like
Samuel Butler, Aldous Huxley, and E. M. Forster. In their
novels we notice the tendency of scoffing at material values and
realistic portraiture of the sordidness of life. Samuel Butler
satirised the realism of modern civilization and its insistence on
machinery in Erewhon the title of which is an anagram for
nowhere. Aldous Huxley exposes post war disillusionment and
immorality in Yellow Crome. The London society is exposed in
all its ugly and wasteful futility in this novel and Those Barren
Leaves. E. M. Forster is a severe critic ot this materialism, and his
Howards End is a bitter attack on the business mind and the
worship of business in industrialised England. Forster attacks the
Wilcoxes, thorough going materialists and upholds Schlegels
upholders of moral and aesthetic values in life. Virginia Woolf
severely criticised the Edwardian realism and wrote with character-
istic frankness, ^^It is because they are spirit but vrith the body that
they have disappointed us, and left us with the feeling that the
sooner English fiction turns its back upon them, as politely as
may be, and marches, if only into the desert, the better for its
soul.*'

The reaction against the realistic trend of Edwardian fiction
was further perceptible in the work of the romancers, who popula-
rised another trend in fiction, namely, a love for romance,
adventure, and the exotic lands. Aniong these writer who popu-
larised romance, the most significant were Conrad, Kipling,
Haggard, Weyman and Maurice Hewlett. Conrad’s novels struck
a new note in English fiction. He presented scenes of tropical
jungles and sea-life in his The Nigger Of Narcissus. The Heart of
Darkness^ Lord Jimy Rescue and Rover. His sea tales are thrilling
and suffused in the aroma of romantic adventure, and struggle with
the forces of nature. His actualities became clothed with romantic
glamour and adventurous exaltation. Conrad emphasised the
principle of fidelity in human relations, and laid greater stress on
moral values than material values. Betrayal of trust and deception
of oner’s fellowmen seemed to him to be heinous sins, and all his
sea-tales particularly Under Western Eye and Lord Jim^ illustrate

( 339 )

the philosophic strength of his moral convictions. « Indeed, far
from writing in any materialistic spirit” says Gerald Bullet,
“Conrad wrote with the vision and spirit of a poet. He wrote of
the conflict between and man and nature, and of the mysterious of
the human soul, and, in his view of man the word “soul” was an
inevitable word to use.”

James Matthew Barrie (1860-1937) turned from realism to
romance, and closely followed in the footsteps of R. L, Stevenson,
the prince of romancers. Kipling was a different kind of romancer.
Whereas Scott and Stevenson invoked the past and wove dreams
of romantic fantasy, Kipling found romance in the present
realities of life. “Kipling’* says W. L, Cross, “is the romancer
of the present, of the modern social order, on which shines from
afar a light as resplendent as that which shone on medieval
society, for it is the same light of the. imagination. Kipling feels
the presence of romance in shot and shell as well as bows and
arrows, in the loves of Mulvaney and Dinab as in Ivanhoe and
Rowena, in the huge python as in the fire-breathing dragon.” His
Jungle Books are replete with the romance of the forest, and his
Soldiers Three with the romance of the barracks.

During the Georgian period, a new tendency began to be
perceptible in English fiction, and it centred round the glorih-
cation of sex and primal human emotions and passions. The
Victorian novelists and poets had frowned on the naked dance
of sex in their works and exalted married love over illegal flirtation.
The Victorian prudery about sex-morality was given a jolt by the
Georgian novelists, and several prominent novelists got busy with
the presentation of sex-relationship in their novels. In this respect
the works of D. H. Lawrence, Aidous Huxley, Somerset Maugham
and James Joyce are worthy of special consideration. These
novelists treat of the physical side of sex in a blunt, matter-of fact
manner without attempting to hide the naked facts like the
Victorian-prudes.

Among the novelists who popularised the convention of
set in the modern novel stands D. H. Lawrence who clearly stated
his faith in Sons and Lovers^ in the following words— “My great
religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the
intellect. All t want to answer to my blood, direct.

I 340 )

without tribbling intervention of mind or moral or what-not. 1
conceive of man’s body as a ^tind of dame, like a candle, forever
upright and yet flowing.” In his The White Peacock, The Rainbow,
and Lady Chatterley^s Lover, he concentrated on the subject of
sex and wrote boldly in the preface of Lady Chatterley*s Lover---
want men and women to be able to think sex fully, completely,
honestly, and clearly.” Lawrence’s work is saturated in sex even
when it happens to be devoid of sexual incident. * Aldous Huxley,
in his novels, concentrates on the portrayal of sex life. In Point
Counter Point Huxley is wholly preoccupied with sex. His happy
characters are those who like Lucy Tantamount are frank sensua-
lists and care not a fig for mental and spiritual values. Joyce’s works
liave been stigmatised as pornographic because of their preoccupa-
tion vtith sex life.

Twentieth century novel in the later part of the Georgian
period began to come under the influence of psychologists, and
as the years advanced, the pyschological tendency became mote
pronounced in English fiction. A new technique was developed
in the psychological detion, and the new trend found its best
exposition in the stream of consciousness, which was cultivated in
all its complexity by William James, Dorothy Richardson, James
[oyce and Virgiania Woolf. In the new technique of the stream
of consciousness, extreme emphasis is laid on subjectivism, and
the passive states on the mind. Transitions are sudden, and
progression is hampered. Past is mixed up with the present, and
retrospect intrudes upon prospect. Present memories are inex-
tricably combined and mixed up with past memories in an
incoherent manner. Strict chronological development of the
story is marred by rapid transition), and an electric notation
copes with time’s swift spinning. In one respect, the stream of
consciousness novel bears a close similarity to Imagist poetry.
Words are employed by novelists of this school not in accordance
with the rules and conventions of grammar, but in a peculiar
manner of their own using them in their original picturesque or
itnagistic sense. In their endeavour to dramatize all shades of
consciousness, they allow thought and emotion to shape and
formulate words which do full justice to them. There is thus
lack of coherence and harmony and sometimes one iabaffle4^y

( 341 )

the jargon of words.

The stream of consciousness novelists follow the expressio-
nist technique of presenting the characters, not by reporting
their actions and sayings as observed by a recorder, “but by
making the characters themselves reveal their inmost thoughts,
moods and feelings, however inconsequent, fragmentary, and
Heeting these may be,” There is nothing fixed and steady.
h;vefything is in a flux, moving as if in the flow of a stream, with
the result that there is a *mad chaos’ in this stream of conscious-
ness of fiction.

J. W. Beach in the Twentieth Century Novel makes the
position about this stream of consciousness fiction very clear in
ihc following words — “The stream-of-consciousness technique
IS almost invariably applied to persons of an extremely ‘introver-
ted type” to neurotics and those of unbalanced mind, or to
occasional states of mind of normal individuals bordering on
^obsession or delirium : states of mind in which the consciousness
is given over to the chaotic play of sensations and associations,
undirected by the normal will to ratio lal conduct.”

The novels of Dorothy Richardson present the first experiment
in the stream of consciousness fiction and psychological novel in
the modern age. She presents the experiences of Miriam
Henderson in Printed Roofs and her story is continued in a series
>f sequels, collectively called The Pilgrimage. The Pilgrimage
books mark an epoch in the technical development of the novelist’s
act. Dorothy Richardson presents the moments of Miriam’s
consciousness fleeting from one shade of consciousness to another
without any stoppage anywhere. It is Miriam’s stream of
consciousness going on and on. In this process we come across
moments tense with vibration, moments drawn out fine almost to
a snapping point. James Joyes in his Ulysses presents another
psychological novel in the stream of consciousness technique. lo
this novel he presents the experiences of Leopold Bloom in Dublin
extending over a day and covering eighteen episodes unconnected
with each other. There are fleeting glimpses of the realities of
life as seen by bis characters and these stray reflections hardly
cohere into the framework of a cogent plot.

The basic technique employed in presenting the ^thoughts

( 342 )

and reflections of Bloom and his wife is that of internal
monologue. *^The reader is inside Bloom’s mind, in the dow ot
his inconsecutive and pattially formulated thoughts and transient
elings. Bloom’s psycological process is one of expansion and
contraction. An encounter, a memory, an association of ideas
start his mind into extra-activity, which having reached a climax,
ebbs away.”

From the point of view of story telling James Joyce has
proved extremely irritating and unpleasant. He also evolved a
new kind of language in which normal syntax was abandoned and
the sentence was no longer the basic unit of expression. «He
discarded the traditional method of composition and employed a
language in which words were torn from their customary associa-
tions, coined afresh and sent chasing helter skelter after the elusive
shreds of meaning.” Virginia Woolf achieved distinction in this
type of fiction. For her the true and enduring reality resided in the
ever-changing, ever fluctuating consciousness.” Her novels. To
the Light House^ The Waves and Mrs. Dalloway arc good
experiments in the stream-of-consciousness fiction. ‘‘Life is a
luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from
the beginning of consciousness to the end.” “Is it not” she
askdd, “the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this
unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or
complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien
and external as possible.” She further explains her view point
about this psychological ficiion in The Common Reader. She was
aware that “life is a pure flame and we live by an invisible sun
within us.” On its complete illustration of this knowledge her
work has an unfailing power.

Closely allied with the psychological tre^nd in modern
fiction is the tendency to employ science for purpose of romance.
Science has considerably influenced the work of the modern
novelists. Science has revealed to the modern novelist innume-

aspects of life and nature, and has opened new vistas of
thought and imagination to be employed in fktion. The very
texture of the novel has been modified by the novelist’s scientific
exactness of observation and scrupulous regard for. 4etaik<
The scici;i;>ific romances of .H. G. Wells such as Time M&chine^

( 343 )

The Invisible Man ate saturated in scientific love. The Brave
f^ew World by Aldous Huxley is a satirical exposure of the
conditions brought about by science. Huxley’s The Brave New
World is written under the influence of Behaviourism or Deter-
minism under which continual repetition of the same phenomenon
gives rise to a definite type of nervous reaction which then
becomes stereotyped, habitual and hereditary.

Detective fiction, popularised by Arthur Conan Doyle in
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes^ was given a further impetus in
20th century fiction by G. K. Chesterton, Edgar Wallace, Dorothy
Sayers and Agutha Christie. The Father Brown stories of G. K.
Chesterton are very popular and so are the detective novels of
Edgar Wallace such as The Four Just Men and Sanders of the
Rivers.

One prominent trend in modern fiction is the growth of
regionalism, which had been set in vogue by the Wessex novels
of Thomas Hardy. Arnold Bennet is the best exponent of the
regional novel in his tales of the Five Towns in Old Wives^ Tale and
Cluyhan^er Series. Mary Webb chose Shropshire surroundings for
her Precious Bone^ and Sheil Kaye Smith took to Sussex in her
novel he End of the House of Alard. Edin Philpoit has brought
the West Country in his regional fiction.

Biographical novels and novels dealing with family life
have also won recognition in our times. 77/« World oj William
Clissoidy The Forstye Saga and Claylianger arc representative
novels in this direction.

The future of the English novel cannot be ascertained with
any definiteness. The modern age is dominated by politics and
science, and it is just possible that the future novelists may
harness these two forces of fiction is a vigorous manner.
Commenting on the future of the English novel, P. H. Newby
observes —

“There is no way of knowing what kind of novels are
going to be written in the future, who out of the many writers
now at work will realise their promise. Writing about the
future of fiction, V. S. Pritchett said that whatever
happens it is reasonable to say that the interest in character for
its own sake has gone, and that the real subject of the best

( 344 )

writ Qg now being done is that impersonal shadow, *^the contem-
porary situation.’ This does not mean that we are going to have
a succession of political novels— on the contrary, that unhappy
phase in English writing came to an end as soon as the war was
seriously engaged — but it does imply that the very long novel
which ought to present the fictional biographies of a great
many people is unlikely to persist. Even now, as Rose Macaulay
points out, the longest contemporary novels are, on the whole,
the worst.

‘*ln the long run the quality of a work of a fiction depends
on the quality of thought of the times in which it is written. The
great novelists of the past wrote well because they thoughr
well; anyone writing fiction to-day who wishes to do so with effect
must first make up his mind just where he stands, as a human
being, at this moment of history. It is no longer possible for a Jane
Austen to sit in a country personage writing novels of the wars
and revolutions, for the wars and revolutions are so general that
they cannot be ignored; and not the mere fact of war and revolu-
tion alone, but the deeper issues, the bewilderment, the confusion
of loyalties, the search for belief and faith. Unless fiction is to
become a toy it cannot escape these issues.”

Q. 78. Give your estimate of the works and contribution of
Henry James (1843 — 1916) to the modera novel.

Ans. Henry James, the American novelist, occupies a
distinctive place in the history of the English novel. Though he
died in 1816, yet he appears in many ways our contemporary.

the history of the English novel James holds a position analo-
gous to Flaubert’s in the French; both strove to give the novel the
aesthetic intensity of a great poem or a great painting.”* Henry
James was a prolific writer and during his life-time he produced
novels, travel sketches, short stories, criticism and autobiographi-
cal sketches. His work as a novelist falls into three groups. In the
first group we include four novels, Roderick Hudson: The Ameri-
can^ The Europeans and The Portrait of a Lady. In these novels
James studies European life from the American point of fiew. The

* Walter Allen ; Ibe English Novel.

( 345 )

aovels of group arc free from the complexity and involution
of thought that crept into his later work. These novels arc
simple and straightforward. In the second group, we place three
novels dealing with English life and English character. The novels
of this group arc The Tragic Muse^ The Spoils of Poynton and
The Awkward Age. In the third group are included fame’s novels
of maturity and perfection dealing primarily with American life.
The Wings of Dove, The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl, The
Bostonians, The Princess Casamassima are considered by Walter
Allen as, ‘‘novels of a classical perfection never before achieved
in English, in which practice and theory are consummately
matched.” In these novels James “achieves a subtlety of
character-study, a delicacy of perception, and an elaboration of
artistic presentation which rank them high among modern
novels.”* In all these works James attempts “to explore the
furthest possibilities of individual feeling, its genesis in motive,
and its expression in conduct. In this attempt, he brought to the
novel a slow-motion tempo, which H.G. Wells his friendly
adversary, likened to the efforts of an elephant to pick up a

pea.”t

Besides writing these novels, James produced a number ot
short stories of beauty and charm dealing mostly with occult
subjects. His familiar stories are The Turn of the Screw, The Altar
of the Dead, The Beast in the Jungle and The Birth Place

His autobiographical writings are A Small Boy and Others
(1913), Notes of a Son and Brother His critical works are

Motes on Novelists (1914) The Art of Fiction (1884) and The Note
Book of Henry games (1947). These critical writings present
James’s view of the novel, and its role in comtemporary
literature.

Henry Janies As a Novelist.

His Theory of the Novel.

Henry James set forth his theory of the novel in his famous
critical work The Art of Fiction (1884). According to James the
main business of the novelist was to provide his impressions of

* B. Albert : a History of Eoglisb Literature:
t R'chard Church t The Growth of the English Novel

( 346 )

life in such a manner as to create the illusion of reality in his
work. In his view the novelist was an impressionist^ competing
withj “his brother the painter in his attempt to render the
look of things, the look that conveys their meaning,
the colour, the relief, the expression, the surface, the substance
of the human spectacle.’** James considered that a novel
should not be used for preaching or imparting moral lessons to
the readers nor was it to be harnessed for propaganda purposes
or purposes of social reform. “To him the novel was primarily
an art form to be judged solely by artistic canons, cencerned,
not with moral purpose, but with the objective and impartial
presentation of the reality of life.*'**

His Subjects.

James chose two subjects for his novels. The first is what he
calls “the international subject** dealing with the relationship of
the Americans and the Europeans. He found a great many of his
themes ^‘in the impact of one type of society upon the product ot
another, in the study of the processes of adjustment and their effect
upon the development of the individual character.’* The second
subject refers to the conflict of man with his surroundings or the
bocial milieu. He presents certain innocent people spoiled and
corrupted by a set of exploiters. The innocent persons are invari-
ably Americans, whereas the exploiters are Europeans.

Plot Construction.

Henry James paid ho attention to the construction of his
plots like the story tellers of the early Victorian age. He was
essentially an impressionist and a psychologist and as such he did
not very much care for coherence in his plot construction. There
is very little action in the novels of James. “Jt is not customary
with him to round oft his plots. Whether the novel is long or
short U is an episode*"'^

Intelleccual Element in James.

James belonged to the intellectual school of novelists and he
had little place for pure sentimentalism in his works. We feel the
absence of elemental passions and sentimental emotions in hib

* Henry James : 1 be Art of Fiction.

** E. Albert : A History of English Literature,
t Walter Allen : Tbe English Novel,

( 347 )

writings. ""Mind stuff he made the controlliag background of his
fiction.

As a Psychologist.

James was a psychologist, but his method was different
from that of George Eliot and George Meredith, the two promi*
nent psychological novelists of the Victorian age. “George Eliot
begins with the inner states and works her way outward, some-
times never reaching the surface at all. James begins on the
outside and passes a little way beneath, reading character through
feature and movement of eyes, head and limb. It is the method of
Richardson to which is added the trained perception that has
come with science.”**

His Technique and Form.

James was a great technician in fiction and "‘incessantly
experimented with technique moving from subtlety to subtlety and
from strength to strength. He had a greater concentration on
the form of fiction than its subject matter, and agreed with his
pupil Mrs. Wharton that, “the fundamental difference between the
amateur and the artist is in the possession of the sense of technique
that is, in its broadest meaning, of the necessity of form.” James
cultivated the technique of psycho-analysis which was developed
by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf in the Utters years. He evolved
the technique of presenting his story "‘through the consciousness of
a single character, discarding the ubiquity and omniscience of the
traditional novelist.'’ His novels express subtlety of feelings, and
become a complex pattern of subjective impressionism. To many
readers his novels appear “long-winded or affected” due to his
^ubtle technique of presenting the impressions of his characters.
His Characters.

“The characters of Henry James belong to the brotherhood of
intellectuals like himself, sensitive, refined, sophisticated, controll-
ing impulse by reason, and endowed with a faculty of acute self-
analysis. They view their own motives and reactions with a
remarkable detachment and an equal degree of $ubtlety.”:|: “His

* Diana Neill : A History of the English Novel
** w, L. Cross ; Development of the English Novel,
t Gerald Bullet: Modsrn English Fiction.

X fi, Albert: History of English Literature.

( 348 )

people’’ says Richard Church, ‘*a re ephemcr*ds hovering over a
human society already showing signs of the decomposition which
we see to-day in acceleration.”

His Style.

James was an artist and like Flaubert he made strenuous
efforts to search for the inevitable word and the proper image.
He achieved excellence in the presentation of dialogues an in
The Awkward Age, and it is to his credit that he could describe
scenes like a true impresionist in The Portrait of a Lady and The
Golden Bowel. But often he bores us due to his habit of indulging
in long sentences and subtle expressions revealing the inner cons-
ciousness of his characters. “It is maddening to read his prose”
says Church, ‘but one goes on reading because of the extreme
range of consciousness and the microscopic approach to the
niceties of human conduct and inference.

Janies a Novelists* Novelist.

“In a sense, James is a novelist’s novelist. That is to say,
among writers of English Fiction, he considered the problems of
imaginative narration with the most unwavering seriousness, the
most scrupulous discrimination. No other English novelist has
devoted -so much high thoughtfulness to the problems of point of
view and structure, of the infinitely nice adjustment of substance
and form, of the exhaustive exploitation of carefully defined
themes. In English fiction James’s is the supreme technique.
After him there could be no further development of the well made
novel.”*

Q. 79 What contribution was made by George Moore
(1852- 933) and George Gissing (1857-1903) to Realism in
modern fiction ?

Ans. George Moore and George Gissing were realists and
it was their aim to present life realistically in their works. Moore
was an Irishman and early in his life he came under the influence
of Zola and Flaubert, w|io indoctrinated him in the subtle art
of presenting the realit^^l^ things in an impartial and impersonal
manner. In his novels Modern Lover (1833), A Mummer's

* Moody-Lovett : A History m Englibh iiteiaiure*

( )

Wif*'- (18S5), Spring Drys (1888) and Estiier iVaters (1894), he
made a sympathetic study of the poor people and their miserable
existence. His novels present a close and realistic study of the
sordid side of human life bringing to view the misery and suffer-
ing hidden beneath the upper surface of lowly living. The
sympathy of the novelist is always with those whose lot it
is to suffer.

The realism of Moore was tempered by his Irish mysticism
and inclination for religion and $ome of his works such as Evelyn
fnnes (1698), Sister Teresa (1901), The Brook Kerith (1916) arc
tinged with mysticism.

Moore was also a psychologist and his novels reveal his
grasp of character and the inner working of the minds of his
characters. He provides a fine analysis of the mental states of
his characters.

His characters, particularly his women, arc drawn with
sympathy. His Esther Waters presents a fine woman character,
a servant who has to suffer a lot in her life.

Moore’s style is generally simple and lucid and the manner
in which he presents an impartial and detached study of life in an
artistic language is pleasing to the readers. *'An acute and critical
mind, a keen observation of life, an urbane detachment, with its
attendant incapacity to experience the deeper levels ot emotion,
a sharp and often malicious wit, and a delicate ear for the rhythm
of language equipped him admirably for the exploitation of his
chosen form.”*

C is sing,

Known for his critical study of Charles Dickens, Gissing
was essentially a Realist interested in the study of the poor people
and their mean and squalid existence. He did not sympathise
with their lot like George Moore. He simply aimed to focus the
attention of social reformers to the miseries of their unhappy
living. He moves us by his pictures of the sordid and seamy side
of life. He exhibited a rare skill for unflinching realism, concrete
detail, nnd a graphic description of the people whose miserable
life he sought to present in his works. He could not achieve the
detachment of Moore and often coloured the annals of the poot-

B. Albert -A Histor> of Eoglisb Utcimture.

( 350 )

with his own experiences of life. His main works arc The. Nether
Wcrld (1889); Grub Street (1891) and The House of Cowebs (1906),
The Prhate Papers of Henry Ryecroft is autobiographical in
character and presents realistic studies of *the squalid and sayagc
people' without much sympathy for their unhappy lot.

As an artist Gissing is interior to George Moore. “Kis
sense of proportion is often faulty, his plots arc awkwardly cons-
truct! H or spun out to an unreasonable length, his themes and
characters are frequently repeated with but slight variations, his
dialogue is poor and his work is almost completely lacking in the
poise which comes from a sense of humour."

Q. 80. Write a note on the novels of James Matthew Barrie
(186r ^19.^7) and estimate the importance of his contribution to
the I nglish Novel.

Ans. James Matthew Barrie, the prominent literary
luminary of Scotland, was a novelist, journalist, dramatist and
prose writer. Here we are mainly concerned with his work as a
novelist.

Barrie was the main moving figure of ^‘fhe Kailyard
School” of fiction in Scotland. The title of this school came from
one of Burns's songs :

There grows a bonnie brier bush oor Kailyard.

A Kailyard is a cabbage patch, and the phrase, ^Kailyard
Seboor refers to the ‘quainter aspects of village life.' The writers at
this school of fiction sought to represent the folk*scenes of Scotland
and transmuted the rural sides with the colour of their romantic
imagination. The tradition had long been set by Galt in Annals
of the Parish 2Lnd it was the work of George Macdonald and
Matthew Barrie to carry forward the line in their Scottish
fiction.

Barrie's first novel was Better Dead (1887). It was a mediocre
work and imitated Stevenson’s Suicide Club* Later on he
produced Window in Thrums (1889), Auld Licht Idylls (1888) in
which he sought to catch the lives of the common Scottish pea^
sants with all their rural surroundings. The best product of the
Kailyard School is to be found in these works Barrie repreaented

( 351 )

the oddities of village characters with drollery and afFection* and
made his fiction realistic in character.

Bairies’s fame rests on his famous novel The Little Minister.
(1891). The theme of this novel is the love of a clergyman for a
wayward gipsy girl who later no turns out to be a lady of fashion
in the truly romantic fashion of the day. “Stevensotji's technique
of the onlooker >natra tor is ingeniously handled, the story being
told by the vilUgc school master, who is concealing the secret that
he is the little minister's real father.”

Apart fr )m the Little Minister y Barrie’s other works of
importance are Sentimental Tommy (1896) and its sequel Tommy
and GrizeU In these two novels Barrie made a desperate attempt
to achieve psychological realism. The hero Tommy Sandys is gifted
with a creative energy. He is a lively man of imagination and
sentimentalism and fails to adjust himself with the realities of life.
In the first volume Barrie deals with the boyhood days of Tommy.
He brings out his insight and humour in the presentation of
Tommy’s life as a boy at school. In the second volume Barrie
presents *‘a strong contrast between Tommy’s emotional insta-
bility and the quiet fortitude of the girl who loved him. Barrie
admired Meredith as warmly as Stevenson, and the evils of senti-
mentalism are castigated in this pair of stories with all Meredith’s
vindictiveness.”* Barrie was himself a sentimentalist and the
charm of the books lies in *a sentimental exposure of a sentimen-
talist.’ <‘The unexpected violence of the last scene, when Tommy
is accidently hanged by his overcoat suggests by its ambiguous
mixture of grotesque absurdity and Hardian * ironic chance that
Barrie was trying to symbolise the destructive contradictions in
his own nature.”**

From the field of fiction Barrie turned to the world of
drama. The success of the Little Minister on the stage in its
dramatised from turned Barrie into a playwright, and his subse-
quent career was divided between plays and stories for children,
in Peter Pan he dramatised Sentimental Tommy and achieved great
b^uccess. ,

Lionel Sievenson * The Engliah Novel, a Panorama.
Ibid.

( 352 )

Q. 81. Give year estimate of Samuel Butler (1835—1902) as a
novelist and write a note on his principal works.

Ans. **Sainuel Butler was one of the most original and
belligerent thinkers of the nineteenth century. He was *‘thc
literary bad boy of the Victorians, whom he scandalized almost
as badly as his name sake had scandalized the Puritans, and for
the same reason because he understood neither idealism nor
the moral earnestness from which it sprang.*** The earlier Samuel
delayed printing Hudibras for fear of consequences to himself;
the later Samuel refused to publish his work, scornfully
asking, “What is the use of addressing . people who
will not listen ?** So it happened that he was not widely known
or even ^discovered’ until the Victorian age had passed into
history.”** Samuel Butler was a prolific writer and wrote novels,
travel tales and prose treatises. Some of his works Life and Habit
(1877), Evolution Old and New (1879), Unconcious Memory, (1880)
were inspired by the Darwinian theory of evolution and exhibit
the scientific trend of his thought. His classical interests are well
reflected in The Trapanese Origin of the Odyssey^ in which he sought
to prove that Homeric poems particularly Odyssey were written
by a woman Nausicca who had a poor opinion of Greek heroes,
His other works are Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the
Canton Ticino (1881), Shakespeare’s Sonnets Reconsidered (1899),
The Lije and Letters of Dr. Samuel Butler (1896), Essays an Life
Art and Science (1904).

The fame of Samuel Butler rests on three works Erewhon
(1872) and its sequel Erewhon Revisited and The Way of All Flesh
(1903). In these novels Butler blazed a new trail which ran; counter
to the prevailing tendencies of the age.. “At a time when serious
novelists were accepting James’s condemnation of the omnisieot
author, Butler's book (The Way of All Flesh) was dominated by
his opinions and prejudices* When other novelists were attentive
to form and structure, Butler’s book sprawled over several gene-
rations and suffered a major fracture half way through. When
other novelists were depending upon accumulation of detail and
imitation of colloquial speech to produce the illusion of reality,

* Liottl Stevenson : The bnglish Novel, a Panorama.

W. J. Long : Engltdi Literature.

( 353 )

Butlec often contented himself with bald summary of both scene
and conversation."*

Erewtaon, the title of which is an anagram for now, here is a
satirical utopia on modern civilization, its trcattaent of crime,
poverty and sickness. It fulminates against machinery and the
dependence of mao on machinery. The Erewhonians in their
wisdom had banished machinery, the bane of modern civilization.
In the character o^* the Erewhonians there were certain virtues
which Butler found lacking in modern society. They had good
nature and were urbane' and compromising in their attitude. Butler
wanted the people of hiS times to cultivate s jme of the virtues of
the Erewhonians, and discard pri rgishness and bigotry which were
considered taboos in the land of the Erewhonians.

Erewhon or Over the Range is a work of semi-fiction and
“cannot be counted as a novel since plot and characterisation are
subordinated to a satire upon modern civilization in the guise of
a visit to an innocent Utopia in the New Zealand wilderness’’*’*^

The sequel to Erewhon is Erewhon Revisited. It is a more
compact and unified work. It is largely based on the author’s
disbelief in the doctrine of Ascension, represented in the book
by Sunchildism. The book represents the reactions of Higgs to
the credulity of the Erewhonians who had grafted Sunchidism on
their old religion, and started believing in the doctrine of man’s
ascension into heaven.

The Way of All Flesh is a work of revolt against
Victorianism and though written between (1872-84) was published
after the author’s death in 1903 because, “it dealt so intimately
and 30 scathingly with his own family and upbringing.” “The
Way of all Flesh is an example of the novel as delayed action
bomb. Even so, even after 1903, it might have laid, inert for
years if Bernard Shaw had not touched it off. Then it sdddenly
exploded and out of the debris a novel of a new kind emerged,
or rather, d novel with a new subject and a new heto.'’f This
hovel is somewhat autobiographical in character, and its hero
Ernest Pontifex represents the views and opinions of the author.

* UOMl Stevenson : The Gnsiish Nuvei.

•• IWif.

t Welter Allen i The English Novel.

( 354 )

The iathex and uncle of Ernest Pontifex believed in paienfal
authority. They were true Victorians. They wanted Pontifex to
becohie a clergyman much against his will. For sometime Pontifex
proved weak and submis,sive to parental authority but > later on he
revolted against the tyranny of his father. He kicked up the
religious life which was sought to be imposed on him and fell a
prey to passion and carnal desires. He went the way of all flesh.
He managed to insult a young woman whom he took for a prosti-
tute, and was sentenced to six months imprisonment. On coming
back from the prison he started flirtation with Ellen, a maid ser-
vant and fell on evil ways. He was rescued from this life of flesh
liness by his aunt who left him good fortune. Later on Pontifex
devoted himself to literature. There was a transformation in
his life.

The hero Pontifex represents Samuel Butler and the noVel
is partially autobiographical. It is not a complete and truthful
representation of Butljer’s life. There are many points of diffe-
rence between. Butler and Pontifex. Like Pontifex, Butler was
never sent to prison nor di4 he ever engage himself in business as
an old clothes’ dealer.

The novel is evidently an attack on Darwinian determinism
and advocates self-determinism. It aims to expose the shams, the
parental authority, and traditional smugness of. the Victorians. It
is noted for its frankness and is marked with typical Butlerian
wit and irony.

Butler became the leader of younger novelists who were
bent upon flouting Victqrian taboos and rituals. “Butler carried
the assault into the citadel of entrenched respectability by insist-
ing that the self-righteous Philistines (Victorians) were themselveii
cruel, greedy, stupi.d and hypocritical and, above all, that the
most cherished stronghold of Victorian morality, the family, was
a machine of sadistic tyranny that perpetuated these evils from
one generation to the next. . As a scientific rationalist, Butler sub
jected the sentimental sanctions of the home and parental love
and filial duty to a chilly^ anthropological sert^tiny^ and as an
evolutionist he traced the ancestry of his central chi^racten to
show how the dominant patterns of conduct emerged. The demo-
tion of domestic harmony was all the more thorough} by^/hieiag

( 355 )

cciilJocced by Butler's antipathy to Christian faith in general and
the church of England in particular* His revengeful sense of
outrage prevented his book from being an impartial array of
evidence and gave it a demonic energy chat no reader could
ignore.”*

Q. 82. Write a note on the novels and stories of Rudyard
Kipling (1865—1936) and assess his worth as a Novelist.

Ans. Rudyard Kipling svas a prolific and versatile writer.
He was a poet^ a journalist,. a novelist and a teller of tales.

As a novelist he is known, by The ' Light That Failed. It was
produced ,w|;ien Kipling was twenty four years of age. The hero
of. the novel is a young man who goes blind but still manages to
lead a strenuous life. The blindness of the hero has some poig-
nancy for it reveals Kipling's own anxiety for his own waning
eyesight. •"The scenes of London journalistic life and of desert
warfare in Africa have reportorial •effectiveness; but the idealizing
of. the army and of men of action — a compensation for the author’s
frustration of being debarred from a military career — betrays a
tone of immaturity that is less perceptible in his short stories,
even when they convey the same values.”** Kipling’s next work
in fiction is The Naulakha. It was written in collaboration with
his American brother-in-law, but it could not claim much
success.

Kipling achieved distinction in tales and stories. Kim presents
the experiences of a boy who wandered over India in the company
of a holy man. This work gives a realistic picture of Indian life
and'the faith of the people- in supernaturalism and mysticism.
This long narrative tale, “reverts to the episodic story line of the
picaresque romance.”! Captains Courageous is an adventurous
story for boys dealing with a boy who fell overboard from a ship
antd was SAved by a schooner from the Gloucester fishing fleet.
“In The Plain Tales From the Hills, Kipling presents the adven-
tures of British soldiers in Simla, and the prosaic lot of the civil
servants and their sense of duty. Soldiers Three brings out the story

* Lionel Stevensoo— The English Novel, a Panorama.

** *lbld. . . *

t llooel Stevenson : The English Novel,

( 356 )

•

of Mulvaaejr, Onhcris, and Learoyd, ‘‘eternal types of the hard-
drinking^ loose-talking men in the ranks.” The Phantom-
Rickshaw is about Simla and the sad doings that have brought
the place in disrepute. Puck of Pook*s Hill and its sequel Rewards
nnrf Fn/ViVj present “a new amilgam of history with the magic
transfigures and interprets.” The Jungle Books deal with the life of
the Indian forests with extreme realism tinged with an air of
romance. Mowgli, Baloo and Bagheera are the lovable characters
of the Jungle Books even though two are quadrupeds.

Kipling As A Realist and A Romancer.

Kipling was both a realist and a romancer. He gave the air
of realism by his settings as well as by bis characters, but real
realism he lacked. In his works, there is realism without reality.
He was an impressionist rather than a realist, and his pictures of
realism were marked with an air of romance. He was also a
romanticist, but instead of finding romance in the past and the
Middle Ages, he found romance in the present realities of life.
“He is the romancer of the present, of the modern social order,
on which shines from afar a light as resplendent as that which
shone on medieval society, for it is the same light of the imagina-
tion. Kipling feels the presence of romance in shot and shell as
well as^in bow and arrows and in red coats as well in buff
jerkins.”^

Indian Life.

Kipling’s tales are saturated with Indian touches. He was
the first interpreter of Indian life to the West. He is to India what
Maria Edgeworth was to Ireland and somewhat less than Scott was
to Scotland. In Kipling’s stories we come across the India of
magic and superstition, the India of linns and snakes, the India of
famine and pestilence. He has given pictures of life in the Punjab
with its sweltering heat and the madness induced thereby. India
is reflected in ICim, The Man Who Was, The Head of the District,
The Phantom- Rickshaw and Jungle Books,

Imperialistic Note.

Kipling was an imperialist at heart and the note of imperia-
lism is sounded in his works with a touch of jingoism. “His
insistent proclamation of the superiority of the white races, of

W* L^ Cross I Oevslepmeot of the Boglisb KlovsI.

( 357 )

icaia’s undoubted mission to extend through her imperial policy
e benefits of civilization to the rest of the world, his belief io
ogress and the value of the machine found an echo in the hearts
many of his readers.”*

)te of Adventure.

Kipling’s tales are marked with a note ot adventure,
tivity, self sacrifice and loyalty. He imparted to fiction the air
vitality and invigorating salt. The adventures of bis soldiers
s thrilling.

lureate of the Animal World

Kipling was the laureate of the animal world. He interpreted
e conduct of wolves, bears, panthers, monkeys, serpents and
;phants and translated their language into English,
urnalistic Note.

The entire work of Kipling is marked with a journalistic
•te. ‘*lt is thejournalistic flair that enables him to be Laureate
the music hall; that gives him actuality, clarity and conciseness
a writer whether in prose ot verse. It is the journalistic flair
at leads him to be overgenerous with banjo strains and over-
rden some of his prose with irrelevancies.”**

Q. 83. Give your estimate of Arnold Bennet (1867—1931)
a Novelist and write a critical note on his principal works.

Ans. Arnold Bennett was, **an all round man of letters, a
fsonality and a power.” He was a prolific writer^ and wrote
vels, short stories, little books of ^pocket philosophies’, dramas
d critical reviews. He has to his credit more than eighty
lumes, but all of them are not of equal significance. He is known
his The Old Wives Tale^ Clayhanger Trilogy, Riceyman Steps and
perial Paiace. We will now examine these works in some
tail.

»e Old Wives Tale (1903).

The origin of the novel The Old Wives' Tale is to be traced
Arnold Bennett’s experience of an old lady who entered a Paris
»taurant throwing the waitress and the customers in guffaws of

Jghter. Bennett enjoyed the sight of this stout queer womaa

— „ .

^ Albert : A History of English Literature.

^uipton-Eicliielt : A History of EogUtli Literature.

( 358 )

who. iright have, beco pace ypung, slim, perhaps beautiful^ thou^
now she had .grown fat, old and shabby. At once, in a flash,
possibility of portraying a woman fresh in her youth ar
later on in her senile decay came to Bennett. “Takit
Maupassant’s Une Vie as a model, he determined to tell the fu
truth about such a woman in ‘*a heart-rending novel” and tht
thought, that he might excel Maupassant by giving. the interwove
histories of two sisters.”

The Old Wives Tale is a long panorama of the lives of tv\
sisters, 'Constance and Sophia Baines, daughters of a, draper !
one of the Fivq Towns. Canstance, the prosaic young woma
leads an unromantic life in the humdrum and drab atmosphere •
the Five Towns, whereas her sister Sophia, having an overdo
of romance in her character, goes off to Paris with a worthlc!
adventurer to enrich her experience of life. The. two sisters do
meet for long, and when they did they were old and had lost a
the charm of youth. Time had added lines to their faces and ach<
to their ageing limbs. At the end both the sisters die leavin
behind a tragedy of heart rending pathos.

TheJ novel has been called The Old Wives^ Tale, becau
Bennett emphasised in this novel the tragedy of growing old. Tl
book is prettj long and detailed and it succeeds ‘in giving tl
illusion of covering half a century without undue condensatior
[t is not devoid of thrilling and exciting episodes such as tl
description of the public guillotining in I^aris but *the total effe<
is the aqcumulation of everyday events that make up the passa^
of time.' For all its d?abness, the book is not depressing. Tl
two sisters. h^ve family likeness. They are obstinate and stron
wiJUd. In. their old age v hi n they . are finally reunited, **the effci
is not so much the pathos of age and weakness as the triumph (
the indomitable will to live.”’*'

In the Clay banger Trilogy — Clayhanger^ Hilda Less\Mi}\
These Twain — the scene is that of Staffordshire, and the event
contc^ round the affairs of Edwin Claybanger and Hilda Leswa^
who are united in r/yese TWai/i. ‘‘Fertility of invention, integtit
of vision and fine craftsmanship combine to make it a very soli

* Lionel Steveoaoo ; The IsH Nuvt.i.

( 359 )

and satisfyiag ot piece work.”*

In Old Wives Tale and Clayhanger Trilogy Bennett had kept
close to the Five Towns and had described the industrial life of the
people with their insistence on love, marriage, housekeeping,
moneymaking, illness and death. In his Riceymgn Steps (1923) he
left the Five Towns for the dreary London district of Clearkenwcll
and instead of dealing with the lives of industrial people in the
pottery districts, he now focussed attention on the relatively
abnormal psychology of a miser, Henry Earlforward, a bookseller,
lost in the craze of moneymaking. Materialism has its full play
in the novel. The miser dies of cancer at the end. This book is
dismal in character and is written about dismal people in dismal
surroundings. A. C. Ward is an admirer of this novel and says —
“Despite its drabness, the book is illumined by that sense <>t
beauty which is indispensable to the creative artist/’**

In Imperial Palace^ Bennett describes a hotel, with all its
fascinating and enthralling details. To obviate the boredom, the
novelist introduced romantic and human interest in the book. The
novel should be read by all those who intend to start hotel business
in their lives. The novel has a special significance for Arnold
Bennett. It has a symbolic significance. The world was for Bennett
a sumptuous hotel, with marble bathrooms and a marvellous
cusine, in which he considered himself a transient guest. “To him
life was a role that he played conscientiously, and with ability, but
into the skin of which be could never quite go.” (S. Maugham).

The views of Somerset Maugham about these novels of
Bennett arc worthy of consideration. He says, “The Old Wives*
Tale is certainly the best book he wrote. He never lost the desire
to Write another as good and because it was written by ah effort
o!f will he thought he could repeat it. He tried in Clayliangefy arid
tor a time it looked as though he might succeed. I think he failed
only because bis material fizzled out. After The Old Wives'" Tale he
had not eilough lett to complete the vast structure he had
designed. No writer can get more than a certain amount of Ore
out of one seam.’*

* Gerald Euliett : Modern English Fiction*

** A. c. Ward : TwenrieihCeotury liter AUut.

( 360 )

AS A NOVELIST

As • Realist.

Atnold Beonett was essentially a Realist in his act and h
tealisQi is well btougfat out in the vivid and teal pictutes of tl
pottery distcicts of England or in bis study of the Five Towr
The life of materialism is well potctayed in his novels. The intc
nal economy of houses and hotels down to theie plumbing, fO(
as bought, prepared and eaten, clothes and their fashions, mca
of transport, indeed all the machinery equipment and parapherna
ia of living claimed Bennett’s absorbed interest/’* Bennett becan
an interpreter of the society of the Five Towns which he kne
well. But it is to his credit that like a true artist he maintaine
an air of impartiality and detachment in the presentation of re;
pictures in his novels. He did not aim at any propaganda c
moral preaching through the medium of his art.

As A Romancer.

Bennett introduced romanticism centring on the then
of love to take away the impression of drabness, dullness an
sordidness that might be created from the study of his realist
pictures of life.

Besides finding romance in love, Bennett like Kiplin]
found romance in the ordinary things of life. He refused t
identify romance ^with the merely picturesque or the merel
extraordinary.’ God had endowed him with the ability and th
faculty of ‘‘evoking the beauty and romance of the ordinal
lives of ordinary folk which is one of the most attractive feature
of his novels.”**

Hts Characters.

The characters of Arnold Bennett belong to the middl
class society and the novelist shows insight in presenting them if
bis works. There is not that depth and psychological penetratioi
in his character portrayal as we find in Henry James. His heroine:
are better drawn than bis male characters. Sophia, Constant
Hilda attract us more than their male counterparts.

His style.

‘‘Bennett’s conspicuous failing was disregard for the gracet

* Dr. A* S. ColliDS-^EDglish Literature of me ^uih Century.

^ Gerald Bulleti— Modern English Fiction.

( 361 )

of stylo. He wc )tc fluently and vigorously and often achieved
marvels of pictorial and nerve- shaking description. But he seemed
to be insensible to the finer elegancies, and to despise that scru-
pulous attention to the consecrated order and dignity of the langu-
age which is the mark of the man of letters. This carelessness,
h()wever, was not a handicap when it came to writing dialogue.
It is in his vivid and eminently natural conversations that Arnold
hennett's master-strokes of style are to be found.’’* “His dialo-
gue is usually excellent, but he appears to be insensitive to the
finer graces cf the English language, and his prose compares
unfavourably with that of Galsworthy.**

Q. 84. Write a note on the novels of John Galsworthy
(1867-1933) and his contribution to the English Novel.

An^. John Galsworthy was one of the prominent men
of letters during the 20th century. He was a man of versatile
genius and achieved distinction in varied branches of literature.
He was a novelist, a dramatist, a journalist, an essayist and a short
siory writer.

As a novelist Galsworthy began his career at the age of
thirty and his first book From the Four WindSy was published
under the name of John Sinjohn. It was a beginer’s work and
was immature in every way. It was followed by Jocelyn (1891)
and later on by Villa Rubein (1900) in which he sought to intro-
duce the detachment and impartiality of Flaubert and Turgenev,
masters in the art of novel writing. In Villa Rubein Galsworthy
is a pure artist without any moral or social purposiveness. *^Vil1a
Rubein has a charm and restraint which were we speaking the
language of pictorial art, might make us say that it was an admi-
rable example of the school of Turgenev.*’t In the works that
followed, Galsworthy turned his gaze to social, political and eco-
nomic life, and standing on the Middle line he made his
observations on what he saw,

Galsworthy produced his first great successful novel The man

A' Baker-History of ibe English Novel
** E. Albert-p-A History fo English Literature.

^ R. A, Scott James— Fifty Years of English Literature

( 362 )

of Property (1906) which formed the first book of the family novel
The Forsyte SagOm This Saga is divided into two trilogies. In
the first trilogy we include The Man of Property (1906), In
Chancery (1920) and To Let (1921). It was followed by a
^Second Trilogy of the Forste Chronicle’ and contained three
novels The White Monkey (1924), The Silver Spoon (1926) and
Swan-Song (1928) which were published later on in one volume
designated, as A Modern Comedy. There were also two interludes
in this omnibus work — The Forsyte Saga. In this great work
Galsworthy presents a vivid and clear picture of the Victorians
particularly the upper middle class people, the Forsytes, who had
infinite love for propeitY> social dignity, material pelf and power.
The possessive instinct of the Victorians is clearly brought out
in this novel. Soames Forsyte considers his wife Irene as his
property. ‘‘For Forsytes what cannot be bought does not exist ;
art and the things of the spirit are objects to be collected, but
not for their own sake, rather as manifestations of their success
in life. The life of the emotions, the holiness of the heart’s
affections are as closed to them as the life of pure thought.
Theirs was the life of making money, reaching, keeping dogs,
fighting law suits, drinking and walking.”* The ife of the
Victorians has a ring of truth about it and Galsworthy’s handling
of the subject is really admirable. “The reader becomes the
privileged onlooker at a scene so varied and natural as to give
the illusion of the fullness of life within the broad limits of
Forste society .”f

The other novels of Galsworthy are social in character and
reveal his interest in contemporary society. In The Country House
he attacks, once again, the lust for property. Fraternity deals with
class division, the distinction between the rich and the poor, and
the disaster that follows in the wake of misunderstanding. It is a
very unhappy book. In The Patrician Galsworthy throws light
on the gradual liquidation of the upper middle classes and the
emergence of the new social order.

“In this series novels, as in his plays, which were even
more successful during the same years, Galsworthy wrote, as

* IValter Alien : The English Novel.

t Dr. A. S. Collins : English Literature of the 2Cth Century.

( 363 )

befitted his subject matter, with urbane and mildly ironic realism.
But under the calm, gentlemanly surface it is easy to perceiye
his almost unendurable pity for the people who are caught in the
trap of rigid conventions, and his hopelessness as to any solution.
As he saw it, the cultivated classes of England were doomed to
sterile unhappiness by their tradition-bound and materialistic
principles. None of his books has a dramatically tragic ending,
but all are as depressing as Gissing’s in their depiction of normal
emotions thwarted by social environment.”*

As A No?elist

A Novelist of social life.

Galsworthy was primarily the novelist of social life, and was
interested in the presentation of the Victorian scene, particularly
belonging to the upper middle class society. His Forsyte Saga is
a vivid and clear picture of Victorian life representing their love
for property and possession. the social historian of the pass-
ing away of Victorianism, Galsworthy is still without a serious
rival. Their code of honour, their snobbishness, their disrust of
passion find an adequate expression in his novels.” Contrasting
Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy as novelists of social life
Scott James nicely remarks, ‘‘Galsworthy belonged to the so-called
upper classes, and was most at his ease in describing the life of
the country or people of inherited wealth living in London.
Bennett belonged to the humbler middle class and was most
successful when writing of people who belonged to it.”

Galsworthy’s Technique.

Galsworthy’s technique in presenting the picture of society
was that of observing the spectacle of life from the middle of the
road, keeping his balance dexterously without tilting either on
this or that side. He presented “the spectacle of life and its con-
tending forces, himself standing in the middle, like Fate, holding
the balance.” He followed the method adopted by his character
cethru (see through) in the inn of Tranquillity. This method of
Cethru (see through) is perceptible in all his later works. “He
created a new type of fiction by “balancing” as he said, the
virtues and vices of his hero, Soames, against the vices and
virtues of other members of the same family, a method to which

^ L’onal Stevdnson The English Novel, a Panorama.

( 364 )

he held in his subsequent novels and plays.

As a Novelist of Passion and Love.

Galsworthy was interested not only in the study of social
relations, but also in the depiction of passion and love in hi^
novels. Love motif dominates his novels. He took keen interest in
describing youthful passion, lawful, or unlawful and his love
scenes between Bosinney and Irene, jon and Fleur, Dinny and
Wilfred, Gyp and Bryan« have something of the true passion oi
youth, ^'something fresh and holy, a breath of summer blossom,
sunshine or spring rain.” His novels of love end on a note of
tragedy.

Galsworthy’s Characters.

Galsworthy achieved signal success in portraying his char-
acters mostly drawn from upper middle class society. He exhibited
an unerring insight in bringing out the vices and virtues of their
life. Among his male characters representing the Jove for Victorian
property and possession are Soames Forsyte, Old Joylon, James,
General Charwell, uncle Hilary and Adrian. His female charac-
ters are marked with a love for romanticism. Irene is ^‘the spirit
of universal beauty, deep, mysterious.” Fleur, “the flower of
Soame's life” and Dinny **the smile on the face of the country.’"
Helen Bellew, Gyp, Holly, Ann, ace his other vivacious and
glamorous heroines. Galsworthy’s child characters are innocent,
funny and sweet. We remember Jon, Kit, and little Gyp for
their innocence and simplicity.

Galsworthy’s Satire and Irony.

Galsworthy was a satirist and ironically he attacked the
instinct of possessiveness and material affluence found among the
Victorians. He could not appreciate the heartlessness and lack of
emotional understanding which characterised the smug and self
complacent Victorians. The following passage from the Forsyte Saga
will reveal to the reader the ironical verve with which Galsworthy
pictured their insensitiveness and lack of sympathy — “In his eyes,
as in the eye of all Forsytes, the pleasure of seeing these beautiful
creatures in a state of captivity far outweighed the inconvenience
of imprisonment to beasts whom God had so unprovidently placed

^ W, J, Long ^English Literature,

** Scott-James— Fifty Years of Eoglish Literature.

{ 365 )

in a state o£ freedom ! ft was for the animal’s good, removing
them at once from the countless dangers of open air and exercise
and enabling them to exercise their functions in the guaranteed,
seclusion of a private compartment f Indeed, it was doubtful what
wild animals were made foe but to be shut up in cages !”
Galsworthy’s Interest in Nature and Animals.

The novels of Galsworthy reveal his interest in nature and’
animals. His descriptions of the English countryside are graphic
and poetic. His love for nature is best shown in The Dark
FI wer. Bosinney and Irene frequcnily visit the parks of
London. Sussex Down, the riverside, form the background of the
love of Fleur and Jon.

Galsworthy’s Philosophy and Didacticism.

Galsworthy suggested through his novels the lesson of
sympathy and humanitatianism. He suggested patience, forbear-
ance, kindness, and generosity as the possible cure for the maladies
infecting our society.

Galsworthy’s Style.

^*The style of Galsworthy matches his material. It has
the best qualities of the Forsyte spirit, and something more. It is
a civilized, style, quiet, reticent, and assured, without tricks or
fuss. It has a grace and dignity which never assert themselves
too much Irony and a sensitive reaction to atmosphere continually
prevent any dulling of the tranquil surface. When beauty asks
it, an almost poetic glow and pulsation inform to still normal
prose. When passion and deep feeling need expression, a close
restraint of phrasing, a quiet concentration of meaning, produce
the required effect. Without apparent striving he can move the
emotionally deeply.’’*

Conclusion.

‘‘Today it is easier to see him as a whole- to recognize
that for a dozen years he was an active force in awakening Edwar-
dian England from intellectual lethargy : a man of letters devoted *
to the conception of literature as an art, yet equally convinced that
it has a social function to fulfil; a man of great strength of purpose,
of generous impulses, modest in his thought and in his manner
to others; chivalrous in his sympathy for the weak, but with the

^ Or. A. S« CQlltni^EAglish LStera^m of the Twentieth C«atef:\

( 366 )

good sense never to confine his sympathies to a class. Before
his death he had reached the last stag: of success at which a man’s
work has been so much read, and become so familiar, that it is
apt to be looked upon as *passe>^ It was then fhat he was
awarded the Nobel Priae for literature.”*

Q. 85. Give a brief account of the main works of H G.
.Wells (1866— 1046 >.

An«. H. G. Wells was one of the most prolific writers of
the modern age. He was a novelist, journalist, pamphleteer and
a writer of serious books. Over production was the bane of Iris
life because he could not keep up uniformity of excellence in all
his works.

The main works of H. G. Wells fall under three divisions or
groups. In the first group which extends from 1895 to 1908, we
have novels characterised by fantasy and imagination. In the
second group are placed the novels of character and humour. In
the third group we have the novels of discussion and social
commentary. We will deal with the works of each group in
some detail.

T Group

Fantastic, scientific and imaginative novels.

H. G Wells started hts career as a novelist by writing
fantastic and scientifically imaginative novels. The works of
this period, extending from 1895 to 1908 were written under the
inspiration received by the study of the fantastic and imaginative
tales of Jules Verns, the continental writer of romances. There

a difference in the method and practice of Jules Verns and
H. G. Wells. ‘Whereas fantastic adventurousness counted for
everything in Jules Verns, in Wells it was more than a peg upon
which to hang the speculation and social inquiry.”** His first
book of fiction belonging to this group is Time Machine. It
describes a contrivance based on the theory that time is the
fourth dimension. Travelling on the ^ime Machine we go back
io the year 1802 and 1701 when the process of natural selection
had achieved perfection. At that time the human race was

* rt A. Scott-Jamci-^Fifiy Ycaia of English Literature,

** A C. Ward— Twentieth Century Literiliire

( 367 )

divided into two species, a hyper civilized type descended from the
leisured class» and a beastial type, descended from the workers.
These workers lived underground and ate the elegant, ineffectual
'Eloit\ # Travelling on the Time Machine we go far into the
future when we find the whole process of evolution completely
reversed. Giant Crustaceans represent the highest form of life.
Immediately after this book Wells produced The Wondetful Visit
in which ‘*an angel is shot down by an ornithological parspn and
is puzzled by “the littleness, the narrow horizons, of ordinary
people’s lives/’

The next work of H. G. Wells in this group was the Island
of Dr, Moreau. This is a gruesome story of a surgeon who
carried on the work of operating upon dogs and pigs and
transforming them into human beings Wells made a departure
from this work of scientific fantasy in The Wheels of Chance
in which he described the life of a draper’s assisant, recounting
mostly his own experiences of life. Wells returned to the subject
of science in the The Invisible Man (1897) in which he tells us of
a medicine which could make man invisible. In this story of
tragic pathos Wells narrates bow the invisible man is smelt out
by a dog and is brutally done to death by the policeman working
on his trail. The War of the Worlds, “probably the most gripping
of this series describes an invasion by space-ships from Mars,
with a tremendous eyewitness report of the evacuation of
London.” The First Man in the Moon provides an interesting
study of the efforts made to inhabit the moon. Several
difficulties come in the way of reaching the moon. The first
difficulty in reaching the moon is conquered by the discovery
of ‘Cavorite’ a substance ^opaque to all forms of radiant energy’
and therefore to gravity by the scientist Cavor. When the
Sleeper Wakes (1899) “uses the Rip Van Winkle theme for a
forecast of the world to hundred years in the future, a time of
mechanized efficiency and political dictatorship, when capital and
labour fight a war to the death with airplanes,”

Commenting upon these early works of H. G. Wells
Lionel Stevenson beautifully remarks, “These early works of
Wells ate in the category of Stevensonian romance. The imagin*
atye escape into the future is equivalent to Kipling’s and

{ 368 )

Haggard’s excursions into Asia and Africa and the historical
novelist's idealizing of the past. The intensity of suspense and
the solving of scientific riddles resemble the Sherlock Holmes
stories. There is an element of terror, notably in TV/e /s/o/id o/
Dr. MorezUj that harks back to the Gothic romances, trailing
the Rosicrusian stories, Frankenstein, and Bulwcr-Lytton's
^experiments with the supernatural. Wells’s stories appealed
particularly to men and boys, by the co nbination of exciting
adventure with technological detail. Coming at a time when
education was spreading rapidly and scientific research Wis
invading the newspapers, his books had an incalculable
influence by casting an imaginative glamour over the new
knowledge, just as Haggard and Kipling were enthralling other
youths with the vision of imperialism.”*

II Group

Novels of character and humour (1900 — 1910).

The first work of this period was Love and Mr. Lewisham.
It is a painstaking work and is rich in autobiographical references
depicting Wells’s life as a teacher. Kipps (1905) recounts the
experiences of Wells as a draper's assistant. It is the story of a
man who is almost driven to commit suicide because ol
certain business difficulties from which he is providentially saved.
Kipps and Polly arc fine characters of H. G. Wells. Polly is a
richer character and is more attractive than Kipps, Through this
character the author directs our attention to the shortcomings of
the system of education prevailing at this time. Mr. Polly is a
true comic character and the only other character who can be
compared with him in comicality is Joyce’s Leopold Bloom.

Ann Veronica (1909) is the study of feminist movement
culminating in the suffrage. ‘*This novel incurred condem-
nation as immoral because it depicted an attractive girl, who
after living alone and trying vainly to make a career in business,
takes a mate without the formality of marriage.”

Tono Bungay is another significant novel of this period.
**lt is a sataric account of how a young man of scientific leanings
becomes invalid with his unprincipled uncle Pondeveco in
manufacturing a worthless patent medicine. Too Bungay, which

Lionel S/tvenson— >Tfae English Nov.d, a ^anoranaa.

( 369 )

lakes them rich through spectacular advertisement.”

Ill Group

I he Discussion Novels or Commentaries (1901—1942).

The novels of this period are based on discussions ot
soci 1 problems. Marriage (1912) ‘‘repeats the situation of the
Lydgates in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. A man is obliged to
rive up scientific research and go into business to satisfy the
lemands of an extravagant wife.” In the second novel of this
period The Passionate Friends (1913) “a woman tries to solve the
the old dilemma of love versus material advantage by marrying
the prosperous suitor and then having relations with the other,”
The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman (1914) admits a modicum of
comedy in depicting a lady of rank and fashion who alleviates
the dull conventional routine by taking part in the campaign for
women’s suffrage and by encouraging a susceptible author to fall
in love with her.

“Alongside of these four studies of love and marriage,
Wells published two on the more intractable subject of political
ideas. The New Machiavelli is the autobiography of a politician
who plays a central role in public life until his career is ruined
when he deserts his wife for a mistress. The book contains
satiric portraits of prominent figures of the time, including some
of Wells’s former associates in the Fabian Society. After this
ferocious exposure of incoixipetence in government, he offered a
constructive proposal in The Research MagnificienU in which an
idealist undertakes to make himself into a selfless and
fearless leader who will help to create a World State,
but loses his life in a strike riot before has a chance to put
his theories into practice.”’^'

Besides these political works Wells produced many other
works of political significance of which the Elements of Reconstru^
ction (1916), Salvalging of Civilization (1921) and Washington in
the Hope of Peace arc quite significant. Throughout the thirtees
Wells was busy in producing books dealing with economic,
political and social subjects. His main works in this direction
arc The WorK Wealth and Happiness of Mankind (1931), After
Democracy (1932), The An^tony of Frustration (1936). The second
• Uofiei Steveoson— The EngUsh Novel, a t'anorama.

( 370 )

world war brought other treatises, the chief of them being The
Fate of Homo Sapiens {1939)y The New World Order (1940), The
Right of Man (1940), The Common Sense of War and Peace
(1940), Science and the World- Mind (1942).

This period of almost thirty years was not, however,
devoted entirely to pamphleteering and in addition to his
popular educational works The Outline of Histoiy (1920) and
A Short History of the World (1922), novels continued to flow
from his pen. Many of the novels written during the thirties
approached the manner of his maturity, and include The Auto-
cracy of Mr. Parham (1930), the Bulpington of Blunt (1933),
Brynhild (1937), Apropos of Dolores (1938), The Holy Terror
(1939;.

Q. 86. Give your estimate of H. G. Wells as a novelist
and as a thinker.

Ans. H. G. Wells (1866 — 1946) was a prolific writer and
produced novels, pamphlets, histories, stories and romances with
unceasing regularity.

Wells’s conception of the Novel.

Wells had his own ideas about the nature and function of
fiction. He did not consider the novel as a mere matter of
relaxation and entertainment. He considered the novel a
powerful instrument of moral and social regeneration. In his
view the novel has to be regarded as the ^‘social mediator, the
vehicle of understanding, the instrument of self-examination, the
parade of morals and the exchange of manners, the factory of
customs, the criticism of laws and institutions and of social
dogmas and ideas. It is to be the home confessional, the
initiator of knowledge, the seed of self questioning. We are
going to deal with political questions and religious questions.
Before we have done we will have all life within the scope of the
novel.”* Wells made the novel an instrument of social, political
and educational discussion, criticism and reform.

Formlessness In Wells’s Novels.

H. G. Wells did not very much believe in giving a story

* H G. Wells— The Cootemporarj Novel (1911),

( 371 )

vsrcll planned and well executed in his novels. In his Modern
Utopia he stated, “I do not see why I should always pandec to
the vulgar appetite for stark stories.” In his view a novel was
“a discursive thing, a woven tapestry of multifarious interests”
in which could be included all kinds of topics such as business,
finance, politics etc. He conceived the novel as “a large and
affair, a kind of rag-bag into which any odds and ends of
observation and opinion might be stuffed haphazardly.”*

As a Scientific Romancer.

His novels belonging to the first group (from 1895 to 1908)
such as Time Machine, The Invisible Man, The First Man in the
Moon, The Food of the Gods, The Island of Dr* Moreau, deal
with scientific subjects in a fantastic way. The imagination of
the novelist is seen in its full play in these fantastic novels marked
with imaginative insight into the possibility of things under the
influence of science. In these novels he is very much like Jules
Verns and R. L. Stevenson.

As a critic of social life.

H. G. Wells did not keep himself engaged in the world of
scientific fantasies for long and soon drifted from that kingdom
to the wilder field of social life. He became a social critic and
attacked social evils with the vehemence of a reformer. In the
History of Mr- Polly he exposed educational impostures and in
Tono Bungay he attacked modern commercialism. His method
as a social reformer was different from that of Charles Dickens,
the social reformer of the nineteenth century fiction. Whereas
Dickens attempted to gain his objects of social reform through
persuasion. Wells adopted the attitude of a bully and a
hector in achieving his ends. ‘‘When he (Wells) laughed at
abuses he was a second Dickens; when he grew fretful over
them, he became a second-rate edition of himself. And he was
perhaps the first of that army of propagandist writers that, mor<
particularly in the nineteen thirties, endeavoured to hector rathej
that to persuade and convince.”**

Wells’s Characters.

'Wells created a rich variety of characters — men, womei

Gerald Builett-ModerD English Fiction,

** A, C, Ward-Twentieth Century Literature,

( 372 ;

and children ia his novels. But hts chief skill lies in the presen-
tation of odd, eccentric and humorous characters such as Uncle
Ponderevo in Tono Bungay and Mr. Polly in the History of Mr.
Polly, His characters have mostly been drawn from the lower
middle society and constitute the *4ittle mao” of our social
circle. His heroines are modern girls exhibiting ^‘just a contem-
porary variation of the teminine life force, conditioned at first by
her need to play up to the heroes ideals.” His heroes are
young, *‘fuU of strong indistinct desires and fears and a gnawing
indefinable impatience.” Wells’s Children are more natural, and
they seem to be free from the pressure of his ideas. . Wells has
given the liveliest sketches of childhood and his pictures of
children are aa lively and interesting as those of George Eltot.

*‘With all his faults of temper and temperament, he poss-
esses, perhaps in a higher degree than any other living Englishman
the distinctive power of the novelist, that of creating people.
Herein lies his incontestable claim to greatness. For sheer
creative energy he has been compared, and not absurdly, with
Dickens.”*

Wells’s Humour.

•‘The humour of Wells is unique. It is not the eccentric
wit and fun of Dickens, nor the sneering, cutting satire of
Thackeray or Butler. It is not the polished epigrammatic comedy
of Meredith. It is nearer to the worldly, ordinary humour of
Arnold Bennett, rather than to the exuberant slangy humour of
P. G. Wodehouse. It ripples the corners of one’s mouth but
seldom makes us roar aloud as does the humour of Dickens,
Jerome Barry Pain or Herbert Jenkins. Though we cannot say
that he bides his tears under the gaib of a smile as does Charles
Lamb, yet often his humour makes secious things.”

As a Thinker.

**Wells was concerned above all things with contemporary
problems, and he ranks with Shaw as a leader of advanced thought
of bis day. As a socialist he was concerned 4rst with reconstru-
ction of modern society on a more equitable basis, and this he
felt to be attainable only through the spread olE education. This
belief led him to produce not only bis many treatises but also the

Gerald BuKstt— Modern EnglUti Fiction

( 373 )

populac educational works on science. Educational opportunities
and political equality for women were among the causes he suppor-
ted, and .though his plans for a world order involved a large degree
of soeialissation and subordination of the individual will to the
communal good, he was a strong advocate of the importance of
developing the capacity of each individual to its utmost limits.
In pursuit of this ideal of self- development he opposed many of
the conventional restrictions of his day. He was very much
interested in sex relationship and marriage, and his advocacy of
free love placed him among advanced thinkers. The problem of
the adjustment of *the individual to his social environment was his
chief interest, and if be was the opponent of class privilege, for
the proletariot eAf masse he had little respect, and he had the
strongest suspicions of. the methods of contemporary democracy.
His sympathy lay with the individual, for whom he had the warmest
affection. These views, which gave him such immense influence
in his day, are mo.t fully expounded in his eminently readable
prose treatises they also underlie, not only the poorer, over dida-
ctic novels of the 1912 — 1920 period, but also those mature works
in which be shows himself a loveliest of very considerable under-
standing.”* Wells was an optimist and he believed in the
intelligence and disinterestedness of men promoted by education.
He confidently believed that “practical applications of physical
and economic science will give man a worldly habitation worthy
of the possibilities of his nature.”**

Conclusion.

“The future generations will undoubtedly appreciate his
worth both as a great pioneer and as one of the most devoted
servants in our history of the high destinies of humanity.”!

Q. 87. Give a brief account of the novels of Joseph Conrad
(1857-1924) and write a note on his contribution to English fiction.

Ana. Joseph Conrad was by birth a citizen of Poland, but
later on he adopted England for his country. He picked up the
English language with rciriarkable ease and wrote it with fluency

* E. Albert^/TH istbrj bf^ngl Ish Utenturet
** Moody-Lov^t— A History of Eogllsh Utcraturc.i
^ l.B. Coats^ Leaders of Medero Thought,

( 374 )

and poetic beauty. He was not concerned with the problems of
social and economic life, but was principally interested in the pre-
sentation of his own rich experience of life in Malaya, Pacific
islands, and exotic lands. Underlying all his novels the reader can
detect a moral tone emphasising the necessity of practising the
principle of fidelity in all human relationship.

His early novels Art Outcast of the Islands and Almayer*s
Folly are rich in tropical background and are redolent of the tropi-
cal rivers and vegetation. The er of the Narcissus (1897) *'is
a moving story of life on ship, remarkable for its powerful
atmosphere, its sea description, and its character studyv Donkin
is one of the best of his many vividly drawn villains and is a figure
in Smollett’s vein.*’ It is a gruesome novel and the tragic intensity
of the death of the negro touches us deeply. In 1900 Conrad pro-
duced his best novel Lord Jim. It was for the first time in this novel
that Conrad adopted the oblique and indirect method of narration
through the ironical Marlow, who also figures in his later novels.
The novel emphasises the principle of fidelity and faithfulness in
human life. Those who betray the trust reposed in them are never
at ease and receive divine punishment. It is impressionistic in
character and the story is a conglomeration of loosely scattered
incidents revolving round the central character, Jim, the second
officer on the ship ‘Patna*. Youth and Typhoon (1902-3) are tales of
sea lite. The Heart of Darkness and The End of Tether provide
vivid descriptions of eastern lands and take us in the heart ot
Malaya. Nostromo (1904) takes us to Africa, and The Mirrors of
the Sea recounts the personal experiences of the novelist about
the sea

The Secret Agent (1907) is the story of the underworld of
London and is impressionistic in character. Under Western Eyes
(1911) is a talc of Russian life dealing with the activities of the
Russian revolutionaries. The character of Razumov is finely
portrayed and the general atmosphere in the novel is that'of feat.
Chance (1914) is loose in structure though it reveals Conrad’s
power as an artist. An Iceland Tale (1915), Within the Tides-Tales
(1915) are wsca novels repeating the old experiences of the novelist
about the sea. Rescue (19Z0) and The Rover (1922) complete the
record of the stirring tales of sea life and adventurous incidents

( 375 )

narrated in a colourful manner.

As A Novelist.

The Theme Of Conrad’s Novels— His Subjects.

Conrad was interested in two subjects. He chose to make
his own experiences of sea-life and tropical areas as the subject
matter of his novels. The background of his novels is furnished
by the sea and the luxuriant forests of Malaya. Another subject
which kept Conrad engaged is the [i^inciple of fidelity and faith
between man and man and the distracting power of evil in human
life. These two themes make Conrad a Romanticist and a Moralist
and both these strains run through his works.

As a Romanticist — The Laureate of Sea-life.

Conrad was a Romanticist interested in the presentation of
distant scenes in exotic lands. He was the laureate of sea life and
the life of jungles. Instead of photographically presenting sea-life
and the life of tropical areas with extreme realism* Conrad sought
to interpret the sea- life and the life of forests, and through the
colour of his imagination give the impression of that life. “He
was again like Hawthorne in portraying the effect that an object
makes upon him who observes it. So he became a master of
impressionism which is poles apart from realism.'**

As a Moralist — His Principle of Fidelity.

As a moralist Conrad emphasised the principle of fidelity
and faithfulness in human life. Betrayal of trust and deception of
one’s fcllowmen seemed to him to be heinous sins to be
condemned and dcprecaied in fierce language. The principle of
fidelity is fully illustrated in three novels (1) Under Western Eyes
(2) Lord Jim (3) The Secret Sharer, In the first novel Razumov
betrays Haldin by handing him over to the police when he
seeks shelter under his roof. Razumov violates the
principle of fidelity and loyalty to Haldin and is a
betrayer of trust. He deserves punishment. In Lord Jim Jim, the
second officer on the ship *Patna* betrays the pilgrims by jumping
from the ship for his own safety at a time when the ship of which
he was incharge was on the verge of sinking. It was an act of
betrayal o£ trust and Lord Jim felt qualms of conscience for the
rest of his life till he could redeem his honour in another

J Long : English Literature*

( 376 )

en tcrprists in * Malaya^ {ship).

Conrad's techniijiue of narration — 7'he indirect method.

In ‘The Shadow Line’ Conrad adopted the traditional
method oi narration and told his story in a direct manner. But
he soon gave up this direct method f6r the indirect or obliqiie
method o£ narration, in which the events happening in the story
are presented by a central character in backward forward manner
building up a picture throiljgh a series of brief sense impressions,
which only reveal their full significance when they finally come
together in a complete whole. In Lord Jim it is Marlow who
indirectly narrates the incidents happening on the Pafn'a in
a ba.ck NX ard' forward manner. “In His indirect approach
his subticy of psychological analysis, and his high degree
of intellect and artistry” says Dr. A. S. Collins, ‘^Conrad invites
comparison with the older novelist Henry James, whose friend-
ship Conrad enjoyed and from whose example he may well have
learned.” For Conrad the novel was not a narration but
a report.

Conrad’s Pessimism.

An atmosphere of sombreness and pessimism broods over
the novels of Joseph Conrad In the battle with the mighty forces
of Nature man proves feeble and at the end meets with disaster.
“In the battle against Nature many fail and Conrad’s interest
as often with Browning, lies frequently in the failures in analys-
ing the weakness of a man’s character.” Conrad presented
the solitary life of his sea captains and harped upon their lone-
liness. The End of the Tether is the majestic epic of solitude
represcsenting the solitary life of Captain Whalley suffering fhe
buffets of fortune and destiny all alone in a world of despair and
mystery. Life in Conrad’s novels is grim and gcuesome» and
sometimes the monstr6us and uncouth works of Nature oppress-
ing humanity appear to be extremely painful to the readers.
Conrad’s Characters.

Conrad’s characters are mostly drawn from the ranks df
sailors, adventurers and explorers. He has alsd created vtllaios like
Kurtz and DoWfiih. His method of character portrayal is unique.
He pk;serve8 objective detachmeut in ctesiting his characters^ ’

Novel From 1918 To 1966

Q. 88. Write a note on the main novels of D.H.
Lawrence (1885—1930) and bis contribution to the English
Novel.

Ans. D. H. Lawrence was one of the most remarkable and
striking figures in the literary world between the two wars. He
was the novelist of sex life, physical passions, and animalism.
In his Sons and Lovers^ D. H. Lawrence enunciated his faith in
physical life in the following words— "My great religion is a belief
in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect.” At
another place Lawrence wrote, "I want men and women to be
able to think sex fully, completely, honestly and cleanly.” No
other contemporary novelist was Lawrence's equal in communi-
cating the sense of living things in a vivid and clear manner.
“Much that he wrote is furious with a convulsive energy and fire,
though his debating style sometimes veered towards the peevish
shrillness of intellectual immaturity.”*

Lawrence’s first novel was The White Peacock (1911). In
this novel Lawrence presents the conflict between man and woman
and sets out to prove that woman is a harpy bent upon the imm-
asculation of man. The Trespasser (1912) further carries forward
the attack on women. In Sons and Lovers (1913), which is con-
sidered an autobiographical novel, Lawrence presents with deep
insight the relationship between son and mother. In The
Rainbow (1915) the concentration is once again on sex, and the
book was suppressed for sometime as it was considered obscene
by the moralists of the time. The sequel to The Rainbow was
Women in Love, in which he expounded with vehemence his
views upon human life. In 1922 was published Aaron^s
Rod in which the Italian atmosphere is presented with -vividness.
Froth his personal experience of life in Australia which he visited

* A. C. Ward : Twentieth Century Literature.

( 37 ^ ;

Lawrence made out two novels Kangaroo (1923) and The Boy ht
tie Bush (1924). In these two novels Lawrence depicted
the Australian background with striking vividness. Jn The
Plumed Serpent (1926) Lawrence concentrated his attention on
Mexican life, and presented with the samfc^ividness and intensity
as he did the Australian life in Kangaroo. Here Lawrence ex-
alted the values of primitive life and denounced the shams and
artificialities of modern civilized society. In 1926 was published
the much criticised book Lady Chatterley's Lover. It is “a novel
in which sexual experience is handled with a wealth of physical
detail and uninhibited language which had caused its suppression
in this country. It is Lawrence's last embittered fling at what
he felt to be the purience of mind which sheltered behind the
conventional notions ot sex and he claimed that it was very truly
moral.” (Albert).

As A Novelist.

The novelist of sex and primitive instincts.

D. H. Lawrence was essentially the novelist of sex-life» and
It was the avowed object of his life to glorify sex and primitive
instincts in his works. In Sons and Lovers he clearly stated — **My
great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser
thah the intellect.” “Me. Lawrence’s work” says Gerald Bullet,
“is saturated in sex, even when it happens to be devoid of sexual
incident.” His iVhife Peacock, The Rainbow and Lady Chatterley's
Lover are novels of sex and two of them were suppressed for
being obscene.

In Law rence’s novels it is the woman who has been castigated
and attacked. In Aaron s Rod the views of Lawrence are clearly
stated. He says: —

“Women are the hottest hell once they get the start of you.
There’s nothing they won’t do to you once they have got you.
Nothing they won’t do to you, especially if they love you.”

Lawrence was the novelist of instinct, sense and feeling. His
stress was more on feelings, passions and instinct than on intellect,
wit, or reason. “Scorning the mere intellectual faculties, he
placed his trust in the experience of the senses, which for him
seem to gain in value as they become more vjblent. Man^s
primitive instincts and the Impulses whith spting from.bjii

( 379 )

scious mind ate his safest guides in life/'* He was, in reality,
the prophet of the primitive instincts and passions.

As a critic of modern civilization.

D. H. Lawrence was a critic of modern materialism and
artificial conventions of our sophisticated society. He sought
escape from money-minded ness of modern civilized people and
the ugliness of modern life in the beautiful and healthy instinctive
life of the people of Mexico and Australia.

Noveli.st of un-conscious life.

Lawrence sought to bring «to light those unconscious
elements in man’s nature which were far more influential agents
than superficial consciousness. The task that faced him was that
of devising a language in which the unconscious could be ex-
pressed. The language he found in metaphor and symbol, and,
although his way to success was not without adventures, he succ-
eeded beyond any writer of his time in giving the unconscious
adequate and powerful voice.”**

Lawrcnce^s technique and method of treatment.

Lawrence was not very much interested in the story and
cogent plot construction. All that he attempted was to treat his
theme in an impassioned manner, imparting to it all the vitality,
vigour and force of which he was capable. “No other ctmtemp-
orary novelist was Lawrence’s equal in communicating an extra-
ordinarily vivid sense of living things and beings.”

Lawrence’s characters.

His finest characters are those in whom he projects his own
personality and views about life. Paul Morel in Sons ami Lovers,
R. L. Somers in Kangaroo and Btrkin in iVomen in Love are mouth-
pieces of Lawrence and it can be safely said that they are his finest
characters. These characters have striking similarities with their
creator. ‘‘They share his bitterness and darkness of spirit, and
like him they live passionately and fully. They are creatures of
strong impulse and primitive emotions, and they are studied with
a remarkable depth of understanding and keenness of insight.”f

* E. Albert : A History of English Literature,

** Moody-Lovett : A History of English Literature,
t E. Albert : A History of English Literature.

( 380 )

His Style.

Lawrence’s style is vigorous and forceful. His descriptive
power is seen at its best in The Boy in The Bush. If we judge
Lawrence, the standards of the meticulous artist with finely
attuned ear and an eye for accuracy of detail and grammar, wc
shall often find him lacking.” Often he wearies us by the repeti
tion of the same thought in almost a similar language. He adopts
the trick of ‘^telling us the same thing and harping on the same
words over and over again.”*

Conclusion.

‘^Lawrence was a barbarian with a streak of genius.”
“Lawrence was the only novelist of his time to use the novel for
the purpose of re-creating the great myths by which humanity
lives, and he did it with a burning intensity and sincerity. When
all is said there is greatness in him. He is something of an
authentic visionary, and the future may be in a better position to
interpret his dreams.”**

Q. 89. Write a note on the works and contribution of
J. B. Priestley (1894—), Frank Swinnerton (1884—), and Sir Hugh
Walpole (1884—1941) to the modern novel.

. Ans. J. B. Priestley (1884 — )

J. B. Priestley, the critic who wrote a treatise
on the English Novel, is himself a novelist of the second
order. He shot into fame by The Good Companion (1929), a
long story of the adventures of a touring concert party. Later
on Priestley brought out Angel Pavement (1930), Let the People
Sing (1939), Daylight on Saturday (1943), Bright Day (1946).
In all these novels Priestley represents -life realistically with fine
wit and liveliness. His style is appealing to the readers. Besides
being a novelist. Priestley also signalised his career as a critic and
wrote fine critical studies such as George Meredith (1926), The
Eftglhh Comic Characters (1926), Thomas Love Peacock (1927),
The English Novel (1927) and English Humour (1928).

Frank Swinnerton (1884—)

Swinnerton, the critic, who wrote The Georgian Literary

* Getald Bullett : Modern English Fiction.

** Diana Neill : A Short History of the English Novel..

( 381 )

Scene and George Gissing is known by his single woik in fiction
Soctrune* He is a realist and belongs to the school of Gissing.
**The re8i|Jt was a solid circumstantial realism lighted up by
considerable penetration but no unusual flights of imagination.”
Hugh Walpole (1884—1941)

Hugh Walpole produced a number of novels during his
life time, the chief of them being The Wooden Horse (1909), Mr,
Perrin and Mr. Traill (1911), Prelude to Adventure (1912), Tlw
Dark Forest (1916), The Cathedral (1922), The Old Ladies (1924),
Portrait of a Man With Red Hair (1925) and The Merries
Chronicle (1939).

Walpole believed in the principle of ‘Art for Art’s sake’,
and instead of dealing with social problems in his novels like
n. G. Wells and Gals>vorthy, he wrote for the pleasure of
creation and beauty. He had a particular liking for religious
life, and the life of the Cathedrals and his novels are rich in
reflections about God and His^power over human beings. Walpole
loved Nature and his novels arc remarkable for descriptions of
nature’s charms. He described nature’s beauties with vividness.
He had a knack of portraying characters and excelled in the
creation of male characters in whom he presented his faith in
religion and God. His style is marked with suspense, animation
•ind ease.

His main defects are (1) Lack of humour (2) Over
i^eriousness (3) Occasional lapses into loose episodes.

Q. 90. Write a note on the novels and achievements of
Somerset Maugham (1874 — ).

Ans. Somerset Maugham is one of the prominent literary
figures of the 20th century. He is a novelist, a dramatist and a
writer of short stories. As a dramatist, Maugham followed the
tradition of the writers of the Restoration Comedy and produced
comedies scintillating with wit and humour. Lady Fredrick is one
of his finest satirical comedies exposing the evils running
rimpant in the upper classes of society.

In the world of fiction, Maugham is known by a set of
novels which have been classified under three groups. In the
first group we include immature novels such as Mrs* Craddocky

( 382 )

The Vfagician, Ashenden and Catalina, In the second group we
place novels like The Painted Veily The Narrow Corner, Theatre^
Christmas Holiday, Up at the Villa and Liza of Lambeth, The
novels of this group are marked with a note of realism and
exhibit, ^*a more intense and passionate awareness of life in which
the accents of the novelist are already grim and dead earnest/’
In the third group are included hts philosophical thought,
provoking works such as Of Human Bond ige. The Moon and Six
Pens, Cakes and Ale and The Razor's Edge.

Let us briefly review these novels of Maugham. Mrs.
Craddock is the story of a woman deserted by her husband in
the wrinkled phase of her life. The novel is marked with a note
of sadness and gloominess. The Magician is written in the style
and manner of Henry Rider Haggard. In this novel magic
operates fully and the dead are called back to life. An atmosphere
of weirdness and uncanniness envelops the entire novel. Ashmden
and Catalina are immature productions. In Ashenden he projects
his own experiences of the war. Ashenden is the Birtish agent
who is after an Indian named Chandra Lai. Catalina is concerned
with the miracles of Christian saints during the Middle Ages and
the scene of this rambling tale is mediaeval Spain. The author
emphasises that ‘*the best way to serve God is not fasting and
penance nor fighting for the holy cause in foreign lands, but to
do one’s duty in one’s humble sphere of life ” The Painted Veil
is a Chinese tale representing the amorous intrigues of a doctor’s
wife with a colonial officer. The Narrow Corner is a study of
the Southern seas and exotic scenes where people are governed by
wild passions and fierce emotions. Theatre represents the life
of an actress who keeps up the Are of youth even in her senile
decay. Christmas Holiday is the story of a Parisian prostitute
Lydia who renounces all her pleasures and wealth in order to
save the life of her husband undergoing life sentence on the
charge of murder. Up at the Villa is a crude, melodramatic tale
replete with passion and wild adventure set in Florence.. Liz^^
of Lambeth is a realistic novel depicting the life of Lixa, a factory
girl, who meets her tragic death tossed about on the waves of
passion. The novel is marked with a note of sadness and the
d^ath of Liza seems to be arbitrarily imposed. "Tha novel

( 383 )

is writtca with a brutal, harah realism and the various scenes
which the novel teems are convincing and over
brimming with verisimilitude.” Of Human Bondage has been
considered the best work of Maugham. Theodore Dreiser regards
it “at a novel of the utmost importance.” in the opinion of
('harles Hanson Towne, ^*Of Human Bondage is one of the
classics of our time. A monumental novel. A deep, rich, pen-
etrating book packed with beauty.” In the view of Godfrey
Winn this novel is ‘"not only Maugham’s best work but also one
of the few books written during the present century to the epithet
^reatC2Ltk be truly applied.” In this novel the novelist represents
the life of Philip Carey, the isolated man with his club-foot.
The novel sets out to give a full account of Carey’s childhood,
upbringing, edu'ration and love. The loneliness of his life is
hinted from the start when Philip’s mother dies. The total effect
of the novel is depressing. Such words as the following uttered
by Carey seem to be cynical —

**Life had no meaning. It was immaterial whether he was
born or not born, whether he lived or ceased to live. Life was
insignificant and death without consequence.”

The Moon and Six Pence is the life story of Gaugin, a
licnch painter, who runs away from human society and
civilir.ation to find relief and refuge in a tiopical island.
The novel represents the renunciation ol the material values of
life for peace and perfection of the soul. Cakes and Ale is an
interesting, witty and satirical novel representing the life of Mr.
Driffield, the novelist and his Bohemian and luxurious wife Rosie
who is a full-blooded woman intent upon making the most
of life. •‘As a witty, malicious, satirical comedy it is bound to
survive as a most entertaining footnote to twentieth century
literary history.”* The Razor^s Edge is a philosophic novel rep-
resenting Maugham’s attitude towards life and his faith in renun-
ciation. Larry is the hero of this novel. He comes to India
and meets with Indian sadhus and philosophers from whom he
imbibes the lesson of renunciation.

Mdugham belongs to the group of the second grade novel-
ists of out time. He is considerably influenced by the French
^Walter Allen : The English NovcL

( 384 )

novelists. He is a cosmopolitan aatboc interested not only to hi$
own country but also in Italy, France, India and South seas. He
represents fine scenes of nature and human society in these
countries.

Maugham is interested in three problems — the problem of
renunciation and materialistic craze for possession, the problem
of love and the problem of the futility and meaninglessness of
human life. In his view renunciation of the world is the ultimate
solution of all our materialistic worries of life. In Love,
Maugham seeks to present the tragedy of love. Love docs not
come out in shining and successful form in his novels. Everywhere
we come across the tragedy of love. Life seems to Maugham *as
a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing.’
Of Human Bondage is his final judgment on the meaninglessness
and loneliness of human life.

Turning to the technical side of his art, it may be pointed out
chat his novels are narratives recounting experiences in detail in
a rambling manner. He tells his stories in a ^‘chatty, informal
and intimate tone. His narrative is often loose and disjointed. It
meanders up and down in a leisurely fashion."’

The characters of Maugham fail to exercise a permanent
hold on us. They arc drawn with insight but there is the lack of
fervour and vigour in their portrayal. We hardly remember his
Liza, Carey, Larry, Gaugin and Rosie, as we remembet
Micawber, Mr. Pickwick, Beckysharp, Tess, Henchard and Soames
Forsyte.

The style of Maugham is cold, matter-of-fact and realistic.
It is all skin and bone. His descriptive vein adds to the charm
of his style. The dialogue is supple and dramatic. He does not
bother about the finer delicacies of style and in A Writer's Note-
Book he makes the frank confession — '*It proves that if you can
tell stories, create character, devise incidents, and if you have
sincerity and passion, it does not matter at all how you write.”

Maugham has one great virtue. He makes us think about
Life and Love. He gives jerks to our self complacent ideologies,
and forces us to view life in a philosophic way. He convinces
us that, ^*art, unless it leads to right action is no more than tke

( 385 )

opium of the intelligentsia.’*

Q. 91. Give a brief account of the main works of Aldous
Huxley (1894— 1963) and bring out the chief features^ of his art as
a Novelist.

Ans. Aldoui Huxley, the grandson of Thomas Huxley, the
scientist of the Darwinian School, is one of the most subtle and
intellectual of modern writers. He was an author of repute and
his works present satirically the disillusionment in social life. He
died on 23rd November 1963. His main works are the following.

Crome Yellow (1921), the first novel of Huxley *‘is some-
thing of a youthful fire- work display.*’ It is concerned with the
Wimbush family, and its young hero Dennis is another Hamlet
in whom reflection mars his capacity for action. It is light hearted
in its raillery. Antic Hay (1923) is sombre in outlook and has
little of the raillery of Crome Yellow, It is a critical study of
post-war disillusionment and immorality. Through the character
of Gumbril the novelist brings out the ugliness and futility of the
intellectual society of London after the first world war. Those
Barren Leaves (1925) is set in Italy and studies the acquisitive
nature of women through the character of Mrs. Aldwinkle This
novel is marked with difFuseness * and is sprawling in character.
Point Counter Point <1928) is a serious novel representing the
conflict between passion and reason, and the foolishness of sticking
to only one point of view with dogged tenacity without ever caring
to look at the other side of the medal. Rampioo provides the solu-
tion by pointing out to different protagonists of sense, intellect and
reason that, '‘civilization is harmony and completeness — reason,
feeling and instinct.” This novel adopts a special technique
described as **the musicalization of fiction.” It is rich in witty
and satirical epigrams. In The Brave New World (1932) Huxley
aatirises a scientific utopia in which everything is controlled by
science, and even mind, body, poetry, art and literature are all
conditioned by the steamroller of scientific uniformity. The severe
critic of this controlled world is the savage John who pleads for
greater freedom of the individual and spiritual life, though he
fails to persuade the inhabitants of this scientific world to live up
to his ideal of free spiritual life.

( 386 )

The new-foun 'I respect for the spirit is best represented in
Eyeless in Gaza (1936). It is a work of mysticism and spirituality.
The hero of the novel is Antony Beavis. In the early years of his
life, he is intelligent, witty, pagan, flippant and a satirist of vigour
and verve. He is responsible for the death of his friend whose
sincere and emotional nature is not understood by him. But
gradually as time passes on, Antony Beavis realises his mistakes.
He drifts more and more towards spiritual life. He experiences the
kind of conversion which Huxley has experienced in the latter
years of his life.

Two non-fictional works, n/irf Means fl938) and Grey
Eminence (1941) are pnilosophic and political in outlook. In Ends
and Means we have essays on a number of political, educational
and religious subjects. Huxley stands out as a pacifist standing
against militarism and and armament. In Grey Eminence, he makes
a brilliant study of the relationship between religion and politics.
Friar Josef, the councellor of Cardinal Richelieu, seeks to spread
religion through political agencies. He keeps spies in his service.
He proves a false teacher. Huxley wishes to draw the conclusion
that right religious ends cannot be secured through the machinery
of political power.

In two recent novels After Many a Summer (1939), Time
Must Have a Stop, Huxley mocks at the corrupting influence of
wealth in the new world. The Perennial Philosophy (1946) is a
philosophical work inspired by the message of Bhagwat Gita.
Failure to' persuade humanity to follow him along the path of non-
attachment and unity provoked Huxley to write Ape and Essence
(1949), **a bitter novel in which he predicts the bestial degrada-
tion ojE»the human species after a third world war.”*

As a novelist Huxley has employed the medium of the novel
tor purposes of discussion and propagation of his views. It is not
the story or the plot that is important in Huxley. His plots are
formless, sprawling and diffused. What is significant in bis works
is the treatment of his subject in a brilliant manner.

Huxley’s novels are satirical in tone. They ^re marked with
force and vigour. His best work in this direction is The Brave
New World in which he satirises the mechanical and controlled
^* Diana Neill : A History of the English Novel,

( 387 )

life bcought about by science.

Huxley has a philosophical message co impart ttirougti the
medium of his novel. In Point-Counter- Point the novelist lays
emphasis on synthesis and harmony between sense and reason.
In Eyeless in Gaza we have the message of .non attachment carried
forward in his Perennial Philosophy.

Huxley does not mortify the flesh. He lays emphasis on
the determination of the spirit by the body. He says, ‘"Soonei
or later every soul is stifled by the sick body, sooner or
later there are no more thoughts but only pain and vomitting
tnd stupor. The spirit has no significance, there is only
the body.”

Huxley’s style in his novels is witty and polished. He is
an intellectual writer and naturally his prose is marked with
intellectual qualities like reason, analysis and searching
inquiry.

Huxley will go down as a thought provoking and stirring
writer of our times.

Q. 92. Write a note on E. M. Forster’s novels and his
contribution to English fiction.

Ans. E. M. Forster (1879—) is one of the prominent
novelists of the 20th century. ‘*As a novelist Forster is rather
difficult to understand him partly because of the symbolism that
works its way through his work, and partly because of the
manner in which he seeks to impart his message. As a novelist
he is often delightful and always baffling and ambiguous and be
has always stood apart from his contemporaries.”*

Forster began bis career as a novelist at the early age of
twenty five and produced his first novel Where Angles Fear To
Tread in (1905)* This novel is satirical in character and |the
author satirises the conventional morality and snobbery of the
upper middle class people typified in the character of Mrs.
Herriton. This aristocratic lady fails to understand the overpower-
fpree of emoti''>n and love, and strives to break the love of
her wf^pwed daughter-in-law Lilia with the vulgar Italian Gino,

* Walter Alien : The English Novel.

( 388 )

with no The novelist ridicaics me losuiai laeas and

provincial morality of the Sawstons represented by Mrs. Herrition,
Fools like Mrs. Herriton and Harriets rush in ‘Where angels
fear to tread’^ This is the underlying irony of the novel.

The Longest Journey was published in 1907. Here again
there is the conflict between convention and nature. Rickie Bliot
is the Shelleyian idealist. He is oppo ed to convention. Unfortu-
nately he is wedded to Agnes Pembroke, who represents the world
ot sordid values. A conflict grows between Rickie and Agnes.
He is rescued from his despair by Stephen, his half brother. Just
before the novel reaches the end of the long journey Rickie
knows for certain that “conventions are not majestic, and that
they 'will not claim us in the end.”

A Room with a View (1908) has its setting in Italy and is
marked with an exhilarating comic tone. “In scale and in tone
it is smaller and lighter than Where Angles Fear to Tread. Its
manner is airier. It takes more colour from the outdoors and
more charm from human absurdity, and the quality of its comedy
is more romantic. The comedy is also shot through with a sense
of melodramatic evil which, though not so violently expressed as
that of the first Italian comedy, is more frightening in its
gratuitousness and its restraint.”*

Howard’s End (1910) presents the conflict between two
classes of people, one representing the hard boiled realists and
materialists represented by the Wilcoxes and the other deeply
rooted in moral and aesthetic values represented by Schlegels.
I'orster seeks to save the Wilcoxes by their marriage with the
Schlegels, A truly balanced view is possible when there is the
marriage of a Wilcox with a Schlegel. This is the symbolic mea-
ning of the marriage betw’een Margaret Schlegel and the senioc
Wilcox. Through this marriage Margaret will gain the “Howard's
Hnd,” the house, which symbolises the heart of England and
which mystically holds the secret of true personal relationship.

A Passage to India (1924) is considered the finest and best
work of Forster. It is “unrivalled in English fiction in its preseo-
tation of the complex problems which were to be found in the
relationships between English and the native . people in India, and
Trilling : E. M. Forster. ~~ ~ :

( 389 )

in its protrayal of the Indian sceiie in an its magic and all its
wretchedness,”* The novel seeks to portray the relations of the
iifitish >vith the Indians round about the year 1924. Forster
seeks to bring about a reconciliation between the East and the
West, but fails at the end.

The novel is mystical as well as symbolic in character, “In
A Pi ssage to India Forster*s intent is to present not only Western
civiliitation in collision with eastern, imperial with colonial, the
human heart in conflict with the machinery ot government, class,
and race, but also a mystical and highly symbolic view of life,
death and human relationship. That he does not succeed
entirely is not surprising in view of the great expanse of the
canvas.”**

The novel is divided in three parts— “Mosques”, “Claves”
vV “Temple”. This three folds division of the book is symbolic
in character. They are related respectively to the seasons of
spring, summer and the wet monsoon autumn of India, and to
man's emotional nature, his intellect and his capacity for love.
The characters of this novel seek to represent these three attitudes
towards life. Dr. ^7,iz stands for emotion; Fielding and Adela
<^>uestcd stand for intellect, and the Hindu Professor Godbole is
the symbol of love. Mrs. Moore is the embodiment of all these
three aspects of life. With her impulse towards emotion
and her involvement in things of the intellect, she seems equally
at home in mosques, caves or temples. Forster represents through
these characters the three ways of leading life. It is the novelist’s
aim to weld these diverse paths together through delicate use of
symbolic motifs so that they form a total satisfying, if mystifying
pattern of life and art.

“America hailed the novel as an indictment of British rule,
while in England the witty satire at the expense of the English
official class in India ensured that the book would be popular
with the intellegentsia. Forster was, incidentally, to show an
almost prophetic insight into the future in the scene with which

* E. Albert— A History of English Literature.

** Frcdiick Karl & Marvin Magalancr— A Reader’s Guide to Great
Twentieth Century English Novels.

( 390 )

the book ends,***

As A NoteUst.

Waltet Allen is of the opinion that "Fotstei is a novelist
diHicuit to assess : he can be as easily overestimated as undetesti-
niated’% and we thoroughly agree with this view. To some readets
Forster appeals intoasely* while others are bored by hi&
representation of life.

Plot Construction.

The plots of Forster are intricate and difficult to follow.
He ‘^disregards conventional plot construction and frequently
introduces starting, unexpected incidents.**

Characterisation .

The characters of Forster are types rather than individuals.
They are the embodiment of ceirtain values of life. His characters
can be divided into two groups, the ‘Crustaceans’ and the ‘Vita-
lists.’ The former are followers of conventions while the latter art
men of feeling and deep devotion. To the class of Crustaceans
belong Ronnie Heaslop, Charlotte Eliot, Major Callender and the
Turtons. The Vitalists arc Fielding. Mrs. Moore and George
Emerson. The Wilcoxes of Howard*s End belong to .the class
•f Crustaceans while the Schlegels have their affinity with the
.Vitalists.

In Forster’s characters whether male or female there is “a
Uck of passion and sexual fulfilment. A religiosity colours
Forster’s major characters. Phillip Herriton’s vision makes ot
Caroline Abbot a goddess. Phillip’s worship oi her in (Where
Angels Fear to Tread) is more a self-denying asceticism reminding
as of the Celibate’s love of the virgin Mother. ”f

There is a detachment in the character portrayal of Forster.
The novelist paints his characters with impartiality keeping him-
self as a bystander. “He does not identify himself exclusively
with any one character, but stands a little aloof, a sympathetic
spectator who from time to time leans forward fo get a more
intimate view of that.”tt

* Daina Neill — A Short History of the English Novel.

** E. Albert— A Histofy of English Literature,
f James Miconkey — The Ndvels of E. M. Forster. ''

ff Gerald Bullett — Modern English Fiction.

( 391 )

As a Realist— His attack on Realism.

Focster has been considered by some critics as a Realist,
but the fact is that he takes greater delight in attacking realism
than in applauding it. **The surface manner of Forster's novels
may appear to be realistic and comic but his impatience with
realism is apparent in the manner he infused sudden act ot
violence and accidents in his plots and in his wilful juxtaposition
of a romantic figure in a realistic environment as in The Longest
Journey or a realistic figure in a romantic environment as in
A Room With a ViewJ*^ His Passage to India though present*
ing realistically the Anglo-Indian relations is more philosophical
and symbolical than a realistic representation of the racial
antagonism between ‘ two great races with different heritage and
history; neither desiring to understand the other, and one of
them in the wrong place.’*

As a Moralist.

As a moralist, Forster is opposed to convention, money
worship, hypocrisy, snobbery and prim affected manners. He is
against all shams, cants and falsehood. He pleads fervently
for the adoption of sincerity, and truthfulness in human relations.
In the Howard* s End his sympathies arc with the Shelegels rather
than with the Wilcoxes, and in Where Angels Fear to Tready he
is evidently with Gino rather than with the affected Mrs. Herritoo
and Miss Harriet. Forster is basically a moralist upholding the
cause of culture, tolerance and civilization in a world open to the
attacks of barbarism, materialism and provincialism.

As a Critic of Contemporary Civilization.

D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Forster arc critics of modern
civilisation reared on material values of life. Forster attacks
materialism in The Longest Journey and Howard* s End, “Not
only did Forster and Lawrence share this genenl reaction against
contemporary civilization, but they had a common positive theme,
toe the novels of both are really exercises on the motif of right
personal iielationshipo, a favourite phrase of Forster’s.”** Forster
relied on heart and culture as an antidptc against modern
materialism, while Lawrence “relied primarily on the passion of

* Moody -Lovett : A History of English Literature.

Dr A. S. Collins : English Literature of the 20th Century.

( 392 )

the blpo4 and was preoccupied with sexuality, a theme almost
alien to Fo ester.”

As a Symbolist.

E. M. Forster is a symbolist, and what could not be
expressed adequately through words is suggested by Forster
through symbols. In Th^ Longest Journey, Forster employs the
symbol of the Train. Rickie, the hero is struck by a train in his
attempt to save the drunken Stephen. The death of Rickie by
the train is symbolic, for it stands for the salvation of Stephen.
Then comes another train in which Herbert Pembroke is seen to
be moving about but fading out of sight. This presents the
passing away of evil figures like Herbert Pembroke from our
life. In Howard's End motor car is the symbol of the rush and
recklessness of modern fast moving civilization. The motor car
becomes for Forster a symbolic indictment of our civilisation of
rattle and bustle. In A Passage to India^ the symbolism is
represented in the very title. ‘‘Passage” is symbolic of ‘link* or
‘conception ^ and by giving the title A Passage to India the
author advocates for link or conception between the Anglo-
Indians and the natives of India. The threefold division of the
hook ‘Mosque’, ‘Caves’ and ‘Temple' is symbolic. It stands for
the seasons of spring, summer and wet autumn monsoon of India.
Referring to man’s nature, the division is symbolically significant.
Mosque stands for man’s emotional nature, caves for his
intellect and temple for his devotion and love. Dr. Aziz is the
symbol of emotion. Fielding and Adela Quested stand for the
symbol of intellect and professor Godbole is the symbol of
love and devotion. Glen O, Allen finds in the threefold division
of the novel three attitudes towards life : the path of activity
(Dr. Aziz), the path of knowledge (Fielding) and the path of
devotion (Godbole). The echo which Mrs. Moore hears in one
of the Marabar caves suggests the empty absolute.

As a Comedian — His art.

Forster’s novels, in^pite of their tragic ending, leave the
impression that their author is a comedian using the comic spirit
of Meredith in the service of his art. He judges and criticises
with an ironical verve, and lashes like Meredith the snobbery and

{ 393 )

hypocrisy of the age— all the time mocking at them like a true
comedian.

L>rical Sensibility.

“Not that there is any question of Forster being only a
comedian. Blended with his comic vein, and equally characteri-
stic ot him, is his poetry. He has an acute lyrical sensibility**

(Cecil).

Forster’s Style.

Like all the best styles, Forster’s style is an exact mirror
of his mind and temperament. We may not call his style grand
tor it lacks eloquence and burning passion, but “it is infinitely
sensitive, infinitely dexterous, infinitely graceful.” The reader
will come across many luminous and sensitive passages in
his novels.

After reading one of his packed, live, iridescent pages, the
work of most other authors seems obvious and monotonous.
Every inch of surface is continuously animated by the play of
mind. Hardly a sentence but gives us a little shock of surprise
and interest. Each novel delights, for all the diverse elements
arc fused together in charming harmony by Forster’s use
of language.

His Place in Modern Fiction.

Arnold Kettle is of the view that “E. M. Forster is not a
writer of the stature of D. H. Lawrence or James Joyce, but he
is a fine and enduring artist and the only living British novelist
who can be discussed without fatuity, against the highest and the
broadest standards.” Forster will rank high among 20th century
novelists.

Q. 93. Give a brief account of the main works of James
Joyce (1887— *1941) assess the value of his contribution to the

English Novel.

Ans. James Joyce is one of the prominent literary figures
of the 20th century. He was the main exponent of the psycholo-
gical novel based on the representation of the stream of conscious-
ness, and his Ulysses is the finest example of the subjective
method in modern fiction. In Joyce, "the twentieth century

( 394 )

y

passion fot experiment in literary form reached its climax/’^

Joyce’s early experiment in literary production was in the
^ direction of writing short stories published in a volume called
Dubliners (1914). The stories of this volume bring to light the
life of the slum dwellers of this city. The stories are objective
and realistic in character and are couched in a simple and direct
style. Another important work of Joyce is A Portrait^ of the
Artist as a Young Man (1916). It is an autobiographical work
and the artist Dedalus is the representative of the novelist in
whom there was a conflict between the forces of asceticism and
aestheticism. a revelation of Joyce’s power to explore the

psycholgy of his own nature with detachment and scientific
curiosity, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young, Man, is unparalleled
in a period rich in self-analysib. Pride and sensuality struggle
for the possession of the soul of Stephen Dedalus, who, having
rejected the help of religion, seeks to escape into tranquillity
through the impersonality of art.”**

Ulysses (1922) is considered the best work in psycholo-
gical fiction of the 20th century and the stream-of-consciousness
theory finds its best exposition in this novel. The novel is set
in Dublin and seeks to represent Dublin life in all its
gruesome realism. The novel sets forth in a rambling manner
the wanderings of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus through
the city of Dublin on one particular day. The novel is extremely
formless, loose and incoherent outdoing the work of Smollett
and Sterne of the eighteenth century. Bullett considers it as **tbc
reductio ad absurdum of the extreme subjective method.” Diana
Neill says rightly that ^*the book is unintelligible and its formal
complexities have left readers bafRed .and confused.” The style
of this book is marked with ingenuity, witticism and satirical
flashes.

Joyce’s only other work of importance is Finnegan*s Wake
(1939) where ‘'subtlety and complexity produce inconiprehensi-
bility. It is a study of the history of the human race from its
earliest beginnings, as seen in the incoherent dreams of a certain
Mr. Barwicker. The use of an inconsecutive narrative and of a

* Diana Neill : A Short History of the English Novel.

="* Ibid. .

( 395 )

private vocabulary adds to the confusion, but it cannot conceal the
poetic fervour, the power and brilliant verbal skill of the work.”*

As a Novelist.

James Joyce belongs to the group of psycholbgical-cum-
realistic novelists of the 20th century. His Ufysses is the perfect
example of the impressionistic method which had earlier been
tried by Sterne in ristram Sh^dy. His novels arc formless,
incoherent and rambling in character and provide fleeting
glimpses o: the life of Dublin which he knew so intimately. In
UlysseSf his love for psychology and realism comes to the
forefront. The study of the novel brings the complete picture of
Dublin life on a particular day. Acutely aware of the pettiness
and meanness of modern society, and of the evils which spring
from it, he is unsurpassed in bis knowledge of the seamy side of
life, which he presents with startling frankness.”

^*|oycc” says Albert, ‘‘is a serious novelist, whose concern
is chiefly with human relationships — man in relation to himself,
to society and to the whole human race.”

Joyce is a comedy writer and his novels are rich in scenes
of playful comedy. The scene in which Leopold Bloom is with
the medical students in Ulysses is a fine comic scene. On the
whole, “his genuis is for the comic rather than the tragic view
of life, and his work is full of wit, puns, and stirtling concerts.
His humour varies from broad comedy to intellectual wit, but is
mainly sardonic in tone.” Walter Allen, in the English Novel signi-
ficantly points out, “The first thing that needs stressing, it seems
to me, is that, whatever he is not, Joyce is a great comic writer,
a comic writer of the quality of Rabelais and Stecne. In Ulysses
Joyce, more than Fielding ever did, is writing the comic epic.”

As a technician in the realism of fiction, Joyce will hold a
place as great as enjoyed by Henry 'James. “He was a ceaseless
experimenter, ever anxious to explore the potentialities of* a
method once it was evolved and in his use of the stream of
consciousness technique, and in his handling of the internal
monologue, he went further and deeper than any other
"''vclist/***

* i7 Albert— A History of English Literature.

** Ibid.

( 396 )

Joyce’s style is marked with directness and simplicity
Dubliners* In his later works his style undergoes a change and
drifts to the side of complexity, subtlety and allusiveness. A new
Tobabulary is invented by breaking up one word and joining it to
other words similarly split. Roots of words coming from many
languages are employed in the service of his style. In short,
Joyce’s mastety of language, hi^ range of vocabulary, bis power,
to create words and to use them to render the impact of sen-
sation on the nerves, and above all his uniijue virtuosity atc
cvcrywherc manifested.”*

Q. 94. Write a note on the main Women Novelist of
the 20th Century.

Ans. Round about the year 1930 women novelists
dominated the literary scene. They followed in the footsteps of
Fanny Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen and George Eliot.
They represented the feminine point of view in their works. The
prominent women novelists of the 20th century are Henry Handel
Richardson, Dorothy Richardson,, Mi$s Humphrey Ward, Sarah
Grand, Rose Macaulay, Elizabeth Bowen, Ivy Compton Burnett.
Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf. Let us briefly examine
the works of these novelists.

Henry Handel Richardson.

Like George Eliot, Henrietta Richardson brought out her
novels under the pseudonym of Henry Handel Richard. She is
interested in Australian life and her works are marked with a
note of masculinity and vigour surprising in a woman writer.
Her main works are Guett (1908), Young Cosima (1939)

and The Fortunes of Richard Mobony (1917 — 1929), a trilogy
representing the study of the misadventures of the physician hero
in Australia.

Dorothy Richardson.

She belongs to the school of James Joyce and Virginia
Woolf. She has made experiments in the fields of psycliologicai
analysis and has achieved success in her work.

Hex main works ate Pointed Roofs (1915) tod Pilgrimage

* Diana Neill : A Short History of the English Noyel.

( 397 ,

(1917). In these works she presents the feoiiniae point of view,
and no woman has succeeded so well in presenting feminine
psychology as does Miss Richardson, in her two works.

Mifs Humphrey Ward. '

She is an intellectual novelist, and her work is marked with
a note of seriousness and earnestness. There is a streak of religious
and philosophical wisdom in her famous work. The History of
David Grieve. Her Robert Elsmere and Marcella arc saturated
with religious and philosophical thought. It is difficult to think
of any other serious novelist since George Eliot.

Sarah Grand.

She is a great advocate of the ‘women movement,' and
has consistently worked for the emancipation of women in her
novels. Her tvvo chief novels sltc Tdela and The fVoman Who
Did, In the art of narration and in the faculty of presenting a
large number of characters in interaction with each other, Sarah
Grand has given her best in Adam's Orchard She is a novelist
of strong intellectual force, and her characters have been
vividly drawn. She is immensely appreciated by women readers.
Flizabelh Bowen and Ivy Compton-Burneit.

Their works have been discussed in the next question.

Rose Macaulay.

Rose Macaulay is a vigorous satirist and in The Orphan
Island presents a satirical portrait of Victorian society. Her
two novels Dangerous Ages and Told by an Idiot arc in the same
style exposing the foibles of the Victorian age To them Rose
added her significant work Poiterism which is written against
Victorian philistinism.

They Were Defeated h a historic ii novel and recreates the
life of the seventeenth century society with fidelity. The World
bfy Wilderness (1950) is inspired by the war. “The characters
of Barbary and Raove are drawn 'with sympathy and understand-
iog) and the wilderness of the bomb desolated area around St.
Paul's Cathedral is so accurately and vividly projected that future
social historians may well find in this novel something more than
a word-portrait of the city in ruins."*

* A, C. Ward : Twentieth Century Literature.

( 398 )

Mrs. Clifford.

She is the novelist o£ the heart and indulges in seotinien'
talism quite in the style (d Richardson and Steele. Her well
known work is Aunt Anne. In this novel she portrays the life
of a foolish lady who had been duped by a young man, who, while
professing to be her ardent and sincere lover, was befooling her
all her life in the hope that after marriage he would become the
master of her wealth.

Katherine Mansfield (1888—1923).

Katherine Mansfield is a writer of shore stories and daring
her life time five volumes of her stories were published. As a
writer of stories, she followed in the footsteps of the Russian
novelist and short story writer Chekov, whose work she admired
inordinately. She was an impressionist in her art and sought to
portray with objectivity ‘*che significant moment in human
relationship, the curious and subtle spiritual adventure and the
poignant ironies of contrasting human emotions.” Unlike Dorothy
Richardson and Virginia Woolf, who are exclusively autobiogra-
phical, Katherine Mansfield studied life objectively and *under-
stood characters widely divergent from herself in bo:h tempera-
ments and accidentals’. Some of her stories have the setting of
Newzealand life, while in others she presents the weariness and
frustrations of her English life. Her stories are marked with a
note of sombieness and are characterised with a haunting sense
of pathos. One should turn to Prelude^ To the Bay^ The Fly^ The
Garden Party to have glimpses of the subtle psychological art of
Katherine Mansfield. Commenting on her work as a story
writer Moody^Lovett observe, ‘‘From the first, she exhibited an
astonishing assurance in technique and in control of her subject
matter. Her touch was unerring. By the suppression ol non-
essentials and the unfaltering selection or telling details, she builc
up to the intensification of a single emotion, mood or psychoiogi-
cal situation. Her growth was in the direction not of a more
perfectly expressive technique, but of intensity of feeling and
mskturity of vision. She progressed from a rather jaundiced and
smug view of people to one of pity and piercing sympathy. : From
a rather broad and sometimes crude satirist, she developed ioto
a master of irony. Her depth of feeling and Subtlety of insight,

( 399 )

togethcf with ber delicately sensitive prose, impacted a poetic
lyricism to subjects that otherwise might have seemed sentimental
or mawkish. She always wielded the gleaming blade of irony. She
viras at her best in the delineation of young children, adolescent
girls and old women, perhaps because the experiences and obser-
vations of her own adult life were too close to her to view in
perspective.”

Virginia Woolf (1882—1941).

Virginia Woolf was the daughter of the eminent Victorian
critic and scholar Sir Leslie Stephen, and was one of the great
women writers of the 20th century.

She occupies a position of importance in 20th century
hetion for she gave to the stream of consciousness novel a new
twist which James Joyce had not been able to impart to
it. Before we deal with the contribution of Virginia Woolf
to fiction, let us briefly examine her works.

The first novel of significance published by Virginia Woolf
was The Voyage Out (1915) followed by Night and Day (1919).
In these works she made a subtle study of the inner lives of men
and women. These first fruits of her genius are remarkable for
the mysterious intensity with which she brought out the souls of
her characters like Rachel Vinrace and Katherine Hilbery. JacoNs
Room (1922) exhibits a fuller advance into maturity. ‘‘It is the
tirst novel in which her personal vision of the flowing nature of
all experience is given full and complete expression.” The novel
sots forth the impression of Jacob FlandetwS about his own life as
a student at Cambridge, as a young man in love and as a soldier
in war. Though the flowing nature of consciousness and the
reality of the life of the spirit are nicely brought out in Jacob*s
Roomy yet the novel suffers from lack of unity and cogency of
impression. Mrs. Dalloway (1925) exhibits a further advance in
her art of suggesting impressions in a loose and scattered manner.
There is no attempt at organized story-telling in this novel. All
that we have is *‘a most carefully selected and fully harmonized
picture of life in London on one summer^s day in 1919/’ The
impressions of Mrs. Dalloway arc represented lyrically in this
novel though in her musings there is a streak of sadness. The
book opens with Mrs. Dalloway going out to buy flowers for a

f 400 ^

party and closes with a description of the party, bat within these-
limits a most complex and fascinating pattern of human experj
ence is woven. It is composed of the day dreams, memories, and
immediate impressions of this central character, enriched by
transitions into the consciousness of other characters who arc
connected with Mrs. Dalloway in some em >ttonal or even mereh
passing relationship.”

Mrs. Dalloway was followed by To the Light Hou^e which
is considered as the best novel of the celebr.ited artist. This novel
i4 divided into three parts. Part I ‘*Thc Windows” Part II “Time
Passes” Part III “The Light House.” The experiences of professor
Ramsay and his wife on a holiday are presented graphically. “Mrs
Ramsay is seen not merely as the selfless centre of her own
existence, but as the focus of concentric series of existences or less
intimately involved with her.” The ii'aves (1931) represents the
technique of the How of consciousness and inner thought in u
heightened tone and is a high water mark oi Mrs. Woolf’s experi-
mentation. ^'Concerned from the beginning with the nature of per-
sonality and convinced of its Huid formlessness, she suggested here
that personality has no existence apart from the society in which it
develops, that the so called individual existence is really no more
than a facet of the existence of a group. She illustrated this con cep*
tion of personality in The Waves by presenting the lives of a
closely knit group ot seven characters in a series of poetically
stylized dialogues or interior monologues. The basic unity under
the appearance of diversity is emphasized by the fact that all the
characters express themselves in the same style, a highly imagistic,
deeply rhythmical utterance that is constantly on the verge of
becoming poetry. The least easily approached of Mrs. Woolf’s
novels, it is also her most brilliant and original creation.” The
Years (1937) shows a return to the style and method of
Dalloway and To the Light House. Orlando takes us to
the Elizabethan days and stretches time to include almo t
ctcjChity.

' A. C. Ward describes the books of Virginia Woolf as
“e;sasperatingly shapeless.” He regards her books as “snippets cut
from a number of cinematograph Alms and indisctlmlniitely
joined up.’' But as compared to the works of James Joyce, the

( 401 )

aovcls of Virginia Woolf have a form and a shape of their own.
They are lucid and luminous though they may be disjointed in
their impressionistic presentation of life.

As a Novelise.

1 heory of Novel— Stream of Consciousness Technique.

Virginia Woolf rejected the conventional conception of
the novel as a realistic portraiture of life fro n the objective
point of view and attacked the work of Bennett and Galsworthy
with characteristic frankness. She once wrote with directness
against the work of these masters of fiction. “It is because they
are spirit but with the body that they have disappointed us, and
left us with the feeling that the sooner English fiction turns its
back upon them, as politely as may be, and matches, if only into
the desert, the better for the soul.” Virginia Woolf adopted the
method which James Joyce and Dorothy Richardson had
practised in their novels. She adopted the method of psycholo-
gical truth and aimed at expressing in her novels the reality of
the life of the spirit. She laid emphasis not on incident, external
description and straightforward narration but on the presentation
of character through the ^stream of consciousness’ method, in
her novels we can trace without difficulty the evolution of her
vision of life and feel at every stage her concentration on the
life of the mind and the spirit. She takes us to the subconscious
and unconscious regions and seeks to convey “the Hickcrings of
that innermost flame which flashes its message through the
brain.”

Virginia Woolf has followed the technique of the inicrnal
monologue and the stream of consciousness, yet her work is free
Item the vices and taints of her other fellow workers. There is
no trace of filthiness or dirt in her novels. She does not wallow
in the mire of filthiness and is always clean and fresh. We seem
to breathe in a rarefied atmosphere as we go through her work.
There is a poetic quality and a love of lyricism in her writings.
“Her work has a lyric rather than an epic quality, but it has a
greater sense of order about it, also of cleanliness and purity.”

Her Characters.

The range of her characters is small. She could not paint
characters who did not share her own unusual qualities. But

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when hec chatacters are of her view and to her liking, she
portrays thesm with conviction and faith. Her characters, "belong
not only to a certain class, the upper middle-class intelligentsia,
but also to a certain temperament. They tend to think and feel and
express their thoughts and feelings, in fact, exactly as Virginia
Woolf herself does in such non-fiction work as Mrs* Bennet and
Mrs. Brown and A Room of One's Own. They are distinguished by
a discriminating intelligence and an acute self-consciousness
which weave a close sieve through which the greater part of the
common experience of life will not pass.”

As an Aesthete and Poetic Novelist^

Virginia Woolf was a great lover of beauty, and her novels
exhibit her aesthetic delight in the lovely aspects of life. As
presented by her, the aesthetic life is as vigorous and satisfying
as any other kind of life. In order to concentrate her attention
on the aesthetic aspects of life, she has to exclude other aspects.
She cannot present the ugliness of life like Proust and Joyce. Her
pictures are exquisitely beautiful and charming. The impression-
istic method adopted by her gives impression of what appears
charming to her view. She brings out the poetry of life and
eschews drabness and sordidness of writers like Joyce. "If Mrs.
Woolf had lived in, say, the sixteenth century, she would have
written poetry, for poetry was then the common form. As she
found herself in a prose age she used prose for what was in truth,
poetic material. Her prose is excellent, but it is rather like a
beautiful dress on a spiritual form which has existence but no
substance.”

Her Conception of Reality.

Virginia Woolf presents real life in her work but her concep-
tion of reality was different from that of Arnold Bennett and John
Galsworthy. "She was persuaded that reality, as distinct from
realism, is an inward subjective awareness, and that to communi-
cate a sense of it the novelist must abandon the attempt to cons-
truct an external world brick by brick and devote himself to the
building up of character through the complexity of consciousness/’
Reality, she construed, as a complex of sensations, feelings, emo-
'tions, and ideas, and she presented this conglomeration of feelings,
laensations and emotions in her pictures of life to create the sense

( 403 )

of beiog alive. Her pictures pulsate with life but the paaoraraa
unfolded in her works is not of a succession in a straight way
happening, but glimpses of life, and very truly do they appear, as
A, C. Ward remarks, "snippets cut form a number of cinemato-
graph films and indiscriminately joined up.**

Her Style.

Virginia Woolf is a prose writer of a high order, and her
prose sparkles with flashes of poetic beauty and charm. She is a
word prainter providing snapshots like a photographer. She
employs words **with a keen sense of their rhythmic potentiali-
ties.** She works as a conscious and meticulous artist^ and
the choice of words shows that she is a cultured woman and a
conscious artist.

Conclusion

“The work of Virginia Woolf has been both highly praised
and strongly criticized. Its weaknesses are clear. The world
she chose to describe is a limited one in which the characters as a
French critic has remarked, ^ive in a luminous mist.’ It is a
world in which there is deep sadness, regret and certain coldness,
{or the mind and spirit of man reign here. In her depiction, how-
ever, of this mind and spirit, in her sense of the passing of time
and in the delicacy, grace and order of her prose, Virginia Woolf
is outstanding. She was aware, as Sir Thomas Browne was long
before her that, life is a pure flime and we live by an invisible
sun within us. In its complete illustration of this knowledge her
work has an unfailing power" (Cazamian).

Q. 95. What do you know about the development of the novel
from 1939 to 1966 ?

Ans. ‘‘We have been reminded with alarming frequency
that the English novel of the last thirty years has diminished in
scale : that no writer has the moral urgency of a Conrad, the
verbal gifts and wit of a Joyce, the vitality and all consuming
obsession of a Lawrence; further, that the novel has forsaken
its traditional role of delineating manners, and morals, and,
Hnally, that the novel is in a decline from which rescue is virtu-
ally impossible. Granted that these claims do have partial subs-
tance, nevertheless one must insist that the novel of the last

( 404 )

thtee decades ot so — the post Ulysses novel — contains the vita- '
lity and vigour worthy of a ma)or genre. Granted also that
recent years have not turned up another Joyce, Lawrence, or
Conrad ; they have, however, seen distinguished work by esta-
blished writers like Graham Greene, Elizabeth Bowen, C.P. Snow,
Ivy Compton-Burnett, and Evelyn Waugh, as well as promising
novels by their younger contemporaries, Lawrence Durrell, Iris
Murdoch, William Goldin, Doris Lessing, Angus Wilson, and
Philip Toynbee, among several others.***

Graham Greene (1904— )

Graham Greene, a convert- ro the Roman Catholic Church,
lacks the missionary zeal. He is ruthless, and aloof in his detached
rearrangement of life. At its worst he evokes pity and the extre-
mity of terror, and dares to re-interpret Scripture in terms of its
Original Charity. His reputation as an outstanding novelist
among the younger group of novelists is firmly established with
the publication of his novel ‘The Power and the Glory’ (1940).
The reason for his success is not so much his versatility, as the
way in which he unifies his various and wide interests under a
single outlook, and expresses them in a prose style chat is al-
most startling in its starkness. “His sentences cut like broken
glass. They have a splintered sharpness, like the stark beams
of light that cut obliquely across the pictures of El Greco. He
may also be compared to the great painter in his odd distortion
of vision. He sees his characters, and the scene in which they
make their penance, with an eye that elongates them, draws
them into thwart gestures made in a garish light. He delights
to expose the raw nerves of evils, showing it as a positive force
in the world, a skeleton like figure working vi.sblc misichief in
the ordinary, everyday affairs of men and women and children.”
He satirises the evils of twentieth-century urban civilization but
he does not preach.

Graham Greene wrote a number of novels and they show
his popularity. He wrote the following novels : The Man Within
(1929); The Name of Action (1930); Rumour at Nightfall (1931);
Stambout Train (1932); It*s a Battlefield (1934); England Made

* F. R. Kjitl : Contemporary English NovcL

( 405 )

Me (1935); A Gun for Sale (1936); Brighton Rock (1938); The
Confidential Agent (1939); The Power and the Glory (1940);
The Ministry of Fear (1943); r/?^ Heart of the Matter (1948);
The Third Man (1950); The Fallen Idol (1951); The End
of the Affair (1951); Loser Takes All 1955); The Quiet
American (1956); Our Man in Havana (1958); A Burnt-out
Case (1961). Outstanding among these novels is The
Power and the Glory It is a political religious novel in the
manner of The Brothers Karamazov and The Magic Mountain.
The scene is laid in a communist state in Mexico. The book
almost deals with the seamy side of life, the painful
and the squalid, the poverty and the vice. The two main
characters of the novel arc the Communist Lieutenant and the
‘W hiskey Priest’ the father of an illegitimate child.

Joyce Cary (1888 -1957)

“He is a versatile, unpredictable, but always interesting
VI liter,” says R. A. Scott James. Cary is the most original nove-
list of his generation and he is the only novelist among his
contemporaries who had carried forward the main
stream of English fiction. He is a moralist, a traditionalist,
a conservative who cannot think of the irrational
dominating the rational. He published fifteen novels in all but
the following six of them are enjoyable: Herself Surpi ised (1941);
To Be a Pilgrim The Horse* s Mouth (1944); Prisoner of

Grace (1952); Except the Lord (1953) and Not Honour More
(1955).

Evelyn Waugh (1903 - )

He is both a humorous and a serous novelist whose tame
chiefly rests on the following six novels r Decline and Fall (1928),
Black Mmhief (1932), A Handful of Dust (1934), Scoop (1937), Put
out More Flags (1942), and The Loved Onr, (1948). His very
strength as a humorist lies in his fieedom to attack in every direc-
tion. As a humorist he avoids the moral purpose intrinsic to
Meredith’s and Molier’s view. All the objects of the world arc
the target of his farce. Nothing is sacred to him. But he was
Qot a fierce satirist as supposed by so many critics. Frederick
Karl says, “Waugh has often been called a satirist, but satire
presupposes belief, doctrine, dogma. Clearly, in bis early and

( 406 )

most effective work, Waugh is defeodiog oo one and oothiog
possibly the only belief that comes through plainly is his
defence ol the sanctity of the individual, as in The Ordeal oj
Gilbert Pinfold (1957)."

^^Larget issues rarely count in early Waugh, and not
until his later work does the reader become aware of ihc
impingement of the world. In the thirties, he was interested
in people whose social attitudes mark them as egoists, eccen-
trics, expedients. In describing their special kind of behaviour,
he revels in the fact that insanity is the norm and sanity the
anomaly. Later, when sanity, or the search for it, become^i
his norm, he appears dull.” When he becomes serious in his
manner, readers find his grave reflections an inadequate com-
pensation for the loss of his light bantering and carefree
humour.

C. P. Snow (1905—).

After the Second World Wat, C. P. Snow is emerging
a major literary figure. He is an author of a number
of novels ; Strangers and Brothers (1940), The Light
and the Dark (1947), Time of Hope (1950), The Masters (1951), The
New Men (1954), Homecoming (1956), The Conscience of the Rich
(1958), The Affair (1960),Corr/der5 of Power (1964).* “No iconoclast
or protestant. Snow is primarily concerned with the inner work-
ings of traditional institutions and the ways that these elements
of society are perpetuated; thus, his interest in lawyers, scientists,
academicians, and administrators ; all the groups who have
assumed power in the twentieth century and make the decisions
necessary for civilized life.”

**Thc fiction that Snow writes is akin, in technique and
manner, to the average Victorian novel of Thackeray, George
Elliot, or John Galsworthy, although it is less complicated in
narrative structure and character development than the work
of the former two and more closely reasoned than that of the
latter. Snow eschews the impressionism- and symbolism of
joyce, Virginia Woolf, Lawrence, and Conrad, and in so doing

* “It is writtan with commendable professional competence.

The real deficiency is that the competence, like the characters

seem contrived." —(The Sunday Statesman January 10,1965)

( <07 )

fcturns the novel to a direct representation of moral, social
<ind political issues. His novelistic world is not distorted or
exaggerated : his art rests on artistic re-creation than on
taithful reproduction, careful arrangement, and common sensical
development of character and situation.”

George Orwell (1903-1950)

George Orwell, as V. S. Pritchett says, was the conscience
(tf his generation. His fame as a novelist rests on his three
novels : Down and out in Paris and London (1933), Burmese D tys
(1934) and Nineteen Eighty Four (1949). The world of the
lifst novel is an economic nightmare to the individual, ^he
world of the last novel is the political nightmare to the hero.
There is no denying that these nightmares are true, but Orwell
usefully failed in making these personal nightmares the experi-
ence of all of us. **His nightmare works out in social and
economic terms not psychologically. The novelist cannot
successfully convey a twentieth century nightmare solely in
nineteenth century terms.”

Having accepted Naturalism as the mode for his type of
novel, Orwell reports impressionistically and docs not attempt
false objectivity. ^*He reports as he sees, but he reorganizes
that what he sees is tinged by what he is and by what he
chooses to look at. Yet despite the subjectivity of much of
Orwell’s reporting, we arc struck by the compelling clarity of
his vision and the sharpness of his images.”

“It is one of the paradoxes of literature that someone
like Orwell, a spokesman for liberalism and a destroyer of cant,
was unable to provide satisfactory fiction although mind
saw clearly a world full of conflicts. Perhaps the very clarity
of the vision made impossible the ‘confusion* and fumbling’
which his less politically liberal contemporaries bring to bear
upon the novel. Perhaps the very directness of his attack upon
the body politic precluded the Urge novel that Orwell should
have written. Once again the specter of Naturalism rises up,
and Orwell is ensnared in a literary trap, precisely as his
'Characters are caught in the trap of life.’**

* F. R. Karl : Contemporary English Novel.

( 408 )

Elizabeth Bowen (1899— )

Miss Bowen is an intensely feminine novelist and shovos
het affinity to novelists as different as jane Austen, George
Eliot, Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. Like Jane
Austen, she weighs her morality carefully and concocts a curious
kind of moral universe; but unlike Jane Austen, Miss Bowen’s
good people are not always rewarded nor are the bad ridiculed.
As an artist she is also influenced by the example of Jane
Austen. ‘‘She believes in clarity of detail, precision of phrase,
and irony of expression, in exploiting the humorous while
eliminating the sentimental, in destroying the hypocritical and
the vain, in maintaining the traditions of the past against the
incursions of the present. Yet she cannot be certain of what
is right, as was Jane Austen, and when her doubts do appear,
she finds herself close to the assumptions of the twentieth
century novelist : unsure of what success entails, doubtful of
what love is, afraid that romance can be easily maimed or des-
troyed, aware that relationships hang precariously on unknown
threads whose clues are mysterious In brief, she finds herself
in the world of Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield/’

In all Miss Bowen wrote eight novels : The Hotel (1927),
7^ he Last September (1929), Friends and Relations (1931), To the
North (1932) The House in Paris (1936), The Death of the Heart
(1939), The Heat of the Day (1949), A World of Love (1955). The
range of her novels is a limited one. She scores a grand
success in presenting young girls, but she lacks the ability in
presenting emotionally and mentally developed adults, llei
women can be safely placed in the category ot ffiat' characters,
as they remain static, incapable of development and finally
immature in their quivering sensitivity. “Nevertheless, the
discerning reader is struck by the limitation of range, the
Buttery concern with a miniature world, the exclusion of much
that makes life exciting and significant, the complacency with
which the novelise repeats both characters and themes. That
this charge was once wrongly brought against Jane Austeo
does not vitiate its application to Elizabeth Bowen — the earlier

( 409 )

novelist's ixoQy and wit often make all the diffeicnce.' *

(vy Compton Burnett (1892—)

“If expert contemporary judgments were faultless, the
supreme place among women novelists of the second quarter
of the century would be given to Ivy Compton Burnett” (A. C.
Ward). She wrote a number of novels : Dolores (1911), Pastors
and Masters (1925), Brothers and Sisters (1929), Men and Wives
(1931). More women Than Men (1933), A House and its Head
(1935), Daughters and Sons (1937), A Family and a Fortune (1939).
Parents and Children (1941), Elders and Betters (1944), Man-
servant and Maidservant (1947), Two Worlds and Their Ways
(1949), Dqrkness and Day (1951), The Present and the Past (1953),
Mother and Son (1955), A Father and His Fate (1957), A Heritage
and its History (1959). The construction in her novels is essen<
dally the same from her first novel — Dolores (1911), to A
Heritage and its History (1959). “The departures from a
common structure are fewer than the adherences : Miss Compt n
Burnett has marked her originality not only in the conversational
idiom but in the form of her novels.” She wrote domestic
novels and her characters are developed round the tightness of
family structure. “One achieves something, or is destroyed,
not because of the world but because of tha family; and a son
ui daughter reels from family to family seeking a haven. Tnc
rebel does not run off to London to find solace in material
success, such things do not exist. The family is his ill : it
dominates, circumvents, encloses, frustrates and provides one
with mates.”

Like Jane Austen, the range of Ivy Compton Burnett's
novels is a limited one. She deals almost exclusively with
upper- middle class society of the Edwardian era. Even then
she is a popular novelist in the post-war world, because most
of the human passions dealt by her docs not exclusively belong
to one era and in presenting them she is in fact doing so in
full awareness of the modern world. She writes about Edwai-
dians; hut she would have written quite differently if she had
^cen living among them.

“Like Jane Austen she has no illusions about human

R, Ksl& : Conteepporary English Novel.

( 410 )

nature and makes no concessions to complacency or wishful
thinking; like her she is distrustful of moral generaliaations.
But a sympathy and understanding for the victims of human
wickedness — the evil-doers emerge unmistakably from the
drift and texture of the conventionalized dialogues and in the
tensions they generate/’* .

L^awrence Durrell (1912—)

Lawrence Durrell,, an astonishing all-round man of letters,
was one of the probable winners of Nobel Prize for Literature in
1960. He has written the Alexandria Quartet of novels — Justine
(1957), Balthazar (1958), MountoHve (1959), Clea (1960) — described
as *an investigation of modern love/ This exciting sequence of
novels immediately bears superficial comparison with Joyce's
Ulysses. *^Like Joyce’s Dublin, Durrell’s Alexandria defines the
actions of the characters and in major part makes them what
they are. The nationalism of the Dubliner is transformed into
the sensuality of the Alexandrian; the narrowness of the
Irishman into the flexibility, the sinister softness of the Egyptian.
In both novels, the sense of place dominates/’f

The novels of Lawrence Durrell **are unlike anything
else in modern fiction, and they are worth reading for the
author’s vivid evocation of Alexandria and the strange and
sometimes sinister sub-tropical characters who abound there.
There are hints that this much-praised quartet of stories was
hurriedly composed and the women in them, with one exception,
are never more than sketches. On the credit side there is some
fine, vehement descriptive prose/’:|:

Angus Wilson (1913— ).

He is a very promising force and he is perhaps the only
genuine English living satirist, **taking the word satire in its
true meaning as a criticism of society related to positive moral
standards.” He is a naturalist and provides very realistic and
vivid pictures of the post-war society. He is quite capable of
handling complicated plots and he has something of the zeal
and enthusiasm of Dickens. His beast known novels are Hemlock

* Gilbert Phelps : The Novel Today.

t F. R. Karl— Contcmi)oi:aty English Novel.

t W. J. Entwistle and E, Gillett— The Literature of .Bnghind-;

{ 411 )

and After (1952)* Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956) aod The Middle
/ige of Mrs* Eliot (1958). In these novels Angus Wilson has atte-
mpted the ‘big novel*, the broad convas. “He cuts across social
classes and includes a wide variety of characters who are solidly
rooted in English life; unlike mary of his contemporaries, he
does not restrict himself to one kind of person and one kind of
reality.**^

V. S. Pritchett (1900— ).

“He was producing promising work twenty years ago, and
has now an assured place among established writers of noveh
and short stories. He is at home with almost Dickensian
bumour among working-class types, but there is a subtlety and
a poetic background to his work, economy and precision in his
style, and a detachment in approach to his subjects which are
the reverse of Dickensian.” His most famous novel is Mr.
Beluhcte Q951). Pritchett projects Mr. Beluncle's superstitions
and shows him as a typically confused modern man who has no
command over his mind.

Anthony West (1914— )

In all, W'est wrote four novels but two of his novels The
Vintage and Heritage are famous among them. In his first novel,
he attempted a Faust for our times, but he failed for several
reasons. “The episode themselves, the substance of the nume-
rous flashbacks, are too commonplace to bear the weight of such
a large design. The imaginative projection of the material is
often admirable, but the imagination must itself be rooted in
the real before it can soar, and the real here is not sufficient to
allow significant thrust.”

Henry Green (1905 — )

“Henry Green has a style and atmosphere which he has
made his own. He wrote his first book. Blindness (1926), when he
was still in his teens; attracted attention with Living (1929), and
has since produced ‘Party Going’ (1939), ‘Pack My Bag* (1940),
•Caught’ (1943), ‘Loving’ (1945), and ‘Concluding* (1948)* He
shines as a writer of realistic dialogue, but is in essence a poet,
with singular skill in leaving us with a sense of the symbolic
significance of the life he has described/’

♦ F, R, Karl : Contemporary English Novel.

( 412 )

Christopher Isherwood (1904— )

Perhaps no novelist of the last thirty years seemed bettct
equipped than Christopher Isherwood to catch the peculiar tone
of his times; he had verbal facility, inventive ability and a sense
of form and moment.” He is an author of the following novels :
All the Conspirators^ Goodbye to Berlin^ The Last of Mr. Norrlsy
The Memorial Prater Violet, and The World in the Evening. ,

Robert Graves (1895— )

He described his war experiences in the novel— *^Goodbye
to All That' (1929) perhaps his best novel is ^Claudius' (1934).
Rex Warner (1905— )

He wrote a number of allegorical novels, chief among
them are : The Professor (1939), The Wild Goose Chase (1938) and
The Aerodrome (1941).

Future of the English I>k)vel.

A question may generally arise whether English hovel has
exhausted itself or it has enough scope which can be enlarged
by the post-war novelists Gilbert Phelps says, "It remains true
that the achievement since the war does not equal that of the
earlier years of the century, but there is at least evidence that the
English novel is by no means a spent force.”* The same
optimistic view is expressed by Dr. David Daiches, '^One can
only express the hope that with the radio serial and various
kinds of television programme taking over the more super-
ficial functions of fiction as entertainment, the novelist
may find clever field for the further development of the
novel as a real art form.” Indeed, the novelist must guard him-
self against his natural desire to withdraw from the large world
into a selective range, because fiction needs weight as well as
intelligence, size as well as manner, and breadth as well as
nuance. It is gratifying that a merging of Symbolism and Natu-
ralism, as in the work of William Golding, Samuel Beckett,
Lawrence Durrell, Graham Greene, Angus Wilson and Irish
Murdoch, would perhaps indicate a tentative direction. ^Such a
combination would allow the. inclusion of the pressing events
of the day, but at the same time it would not hold the novel to

* Gilbert Phelps— The Novel Today. It is an article & *Thf
Modern Age’ edit^^ by ^paisJE^rd.

( 413 )

the level of jouiaalistn. The infusion of a symbolic tradition into
Naturalism would help transform minor or isolated items into
major significance, and yet would not cut the writer off from
immediacies like loc»l politics, class structure, pcrsbnal goals
the nature of ambition, and all the other pressing details of
daily existence. If the function of the novel is to do what no
other art form can : the definition of man in his society, then
the novelist must not detract from the pressures of the great
world in favour of exclusive emphasis upon those of the small.
Only then can the novel hope to fulfil itself/’*

* Hi Gontempo^acy English Novel.

Prose Literature of the
Twentieth Century

NOTE—

The prose literature of the 20 Century is wide and varied.
The prose of this period ean broadly be divided under the following
heads : —

L Prose used in novels.

2. Essays.

3. Biographies and Autobiographies.

4. Travel Books.

5. Historical Writings.

6 . Philosophical Writings. .

7* Scientific Literature.

8 . Literary Criticism.

9. Short Story.

We have already dealt with the history of the English novel
during the 20 th century and the prose employed by novelists in their
works in the history of the English novel. In the subsequent pages
an attempt will be made to deal with the remaining branches of
literature in which prose has been used effectively by literary
artists.

Q. 96. Give an account of the English Essay and Essayists
during the 20 Century.

Ans. During the 20th Century there has been a revival
of the periodical essay» and the personal essay which had been
cultivated earlier by the 18th and 19th century essayists. The
prominent essay writers of the 20th century arc the following. We
shall deal with their works and their contribution in some detail.
G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936).

G. K. Chesterton was a critic, a novelist and 4 poet pi ;rank
but be was also an cf^^yist 9 £i|i;rattaep,ute^^,I^ CSiiicIi balled

( 415 )

him ‘the greatest essayist of his lime/* He began his career i
|ouraalist, turning out weekly articles for newspapers ind
magazines. It was in The Daily News^ when that paper was
edited by A. G. Gardiner, that Chesterton made his earliest reputa-
tion. He used to write in its columns upon all manner of books
and upon nearly every subject under the sun. A single sentence
would be^nough to set him at work with an antithesis or proposi-
tion that brought the stars into Fleet Street and light into many
dark places. But his method was primarily that of a busy
journalist— rapid, nervous and clear. He used to sit and write his
articles and essays in a Fleet Street cafe. There he would sit, a
figure of vast bulk, talking, gurgling with a sort of internal
combustion of humour, emitting little groans of sheer pleasure as
he scattered the flowers of his fancy. It was characteristic of
Chesterton that he should be amused by what he wrote, and by
what he said in public.

Chesterton was a serious writer and he had no faith in art
for art’s sake. He was a satirist and spent his life in vigorously
attacking the conclusions arrived at by intellectuals. There was an
engaging pugnacity even in his lighter essays. He subjected like
Shaw the shams and hypocrisies of the modern age to the hammer
blows of his epigrams and witty sayings. ^'Chesterton caught the
infection of satire and epigram during the nineties, but he
used these weapons not, like most of his contemporaries for
destructive criticism, but for the defence of constructive principles,
old faiths and venerable institutions especially the Catholic
Church, and ior laughing down the sweeping pretensions of science
and modern thought.”** Chesterton’s chief weapons arc wit and
paradox and these he employed with dexterity and ease. “To those
out of contact with the lundamental beliefs which inspired his
joyous argumentaciveness, he might appear a buffoon intoxicated
by his own flow of wit and paradox, and he did develop so marked
a style of paradox as to invite parody, but his dazzling fancy and
play of words was the sword*play of a sincere and single-hearted

* Richard Church— British Authors— A Twentieth Century
Gallery.

Moody Lovett :,A History of Baglisb Literature.

( 416 )

iightej^for his faith/'^ His strength as a writer does not lie in
the profundity oi his thoughts or in the presentation of any
original point of view, but in the clear and witty way in which he
expresses commonplace truchs.*’f In short, **the quizzical humour,
the scintillating wit, the delight in mental gymnastics, in piiadox
and epigram, and the whole hearted defence of whatever is old, or
gay or romantic, are things which distinguish .his writings from
that of any of his contemporaries/’:]:

Style :

Chesterton had a great skill in dialectical writing. He
possessed the gift of writing with peculiar simplicity and beauty,
and with utmost clearness. Anti>thesis was his governing passion.
He had also a genius for paradox. ^^Chesterton revels in antithesis,
distinctions, identities, and absurdities. He argues usually by
analogies and examples, though there is likely to be a real idea
behind his display of fireworks, and often he is talking the
plainest kind of sense He has a gift for illustration worthy
of a great poet; the world is constantly alive for him, and images
occur to him naturally from the farthest end of it. He writes
with a perpetual relish for facts, he knows the habits -of man and
women as a reporter knows them, and he does not forget what-
ever has once engaged his eyes and ears. He is positive,
dogmatic, and sudden in his statements, and se,ems to find a
great deal of fun in speaking extravagantly to an age which has
been trained to accept only qualified judgments, to be skeptical
about everything.” People were not only skeptical about his
judgments but also denounced his antithetical and paradoxical
style. Dean Inge was vociforous in this respect. Richard Church
says, **his literary device of antithesis and startling meoiiphor
became a bad habit.” But we should not forget that he had a
style of his own which has pleased hundreds of thousands of
affectionate readers.

Hilaire Belloc (1870— W53).

Chesterton and Belloc were, friends and these two ran
harness together on many occasions. It was a popular joke of >the

* A. S. Collins : English Literature of the 20th Century.

t Compton Rickett : A History of English Literature;

4: E.. Albert : A History of English Literature.

( 417 ,

mcs to rcfct to them as a hybrid creature, ‘The Chesterbeiloc/
elloc was an essayist, critic, poet, journalist and a writer of travel
ooks. The collection of his essays is to be found in April (1904)
7// on the Sea (1906), On Nothing (1908), On Everything (1910)
id On Something (1911). His essays arc satirical and witty and
iwe their attractiveness to the graceful ease and simplicity of
1$ prose style, and the imagination and insight of the poet which
^ten underlie them.” The most unpleasant feature of his prose
;yle is his habit of expressing himself at the top of his voice. In
le essay on Getting Respected at Inns and Hotels he advised :

<*As you come into the place go straight for the smoking
}otn, and begin talking of the local sport, and do not talk humbly
nd tentatively as many do, but in a loud authoritative tone.”
:dward Verrall Lucas (1868—1938)

E. V. Lucas, a journalist of wide learning, is recognised
s the pre-eminent editor of Charles Lamb’s works and
ographer of Lamb. Hh editions of the life and letters
f Charles Lamb was the result of lifelong sympathy and
evoted research. It goes to his credit that he popularised
he lore of Charles Lamb in the twentieth century. Though he
rote the mantle of Lamb, yet there are a few dissimilarities
etween the two writers. In the words of A. C. Ward, "The
obust urbanity and sophistication of Lucas made him unlike
iamb, who, though he knew, *more about what books are worth
eading than any one living,’ wore all his knowledge with a
ieceptive air of innocence : he was ‘all for quietness and not
>cing seen,, and having his own thoughts and his own jokes.”

The essays bf Lucas arc found in Character and Comedy
1907). Old Lamps for New (1911) Loiterer* s Harvest j Cloud and
uher (1916). His essays enjoyed immense popularity. They
marked by fancy, literacy artifice, common sense, lightness
touch, ease and humour. His humour, though generally kind
ind humane, is sometimes almost harsh and savage as in ‘Those
l^birty Minutes' in which he rails against those people who
agonize their friends by seeing them off on railway journies. His
assays are mainly characterised by his urbanity, ruthiessness of
observation and fancy, ‘In his thoughts,” remarks Prank
Swinnerton, ^be has no superficiality; but his essays and fictions

( 418 )

are written with his fancy and his playful mind^ and it ts only
at times, as in the Swinburne sketch, that one glimpses a fudgment
to which the facile enthusiasms of his fellow-creatures are
the idle bowlings of tomcats on urban rooftops/’ His essays
reveal that he had a great liking for the curious, the human and
the ridiculous. ^ Offer him a story, an incident, or an absurdity,
and his mind will instantly shape it with wit and form. He
can read a character with wisdom, and gravely turn it to fun.
He will versify a fancy, or concentrate in an anecdote or insistence
all that a vulgar mind might stagger for an hour to express.
But his is the mind of a critic and a commentator; and the
hideous sustained labour of the ambitious novelist would be
abhorrent to him.”

Robert Lynd (1879 1949)

Robert Lynd was one of the most outstanding essayists oi
the 20th century. He began his career as a journalist and foi
nearly twenty years under the naixie of *‘YY” appeared his
weekly essay in The New Statesman and Nntian. Like Chestertoa
he had the Fleet Street for his background, and though he was
out and out a journalist, his prose is not vitiated by the defects
of journalism. His sentences are flawless, his diction is chasu
and show by a fine taste and even his subject is not of temporal)
interest. In the words of J. B. Priestley, **He has marched int(
literature by way of journalism, the day’s round, the: common task
It is not everybody’s way; ii is especially suitable for writers wit!
well stored, sane and masculine minds, men who can take hole
of experience and translate it freely, who can ransack tbeii
own minds and plunder the outside world with an equal measuK
of success; and when once a mao does enter literature b
this road, there can be no doubt as to his capacity; he is word
hearing.” Indeed, he is worth reading for his urbanity.
and humour, engaging style and his passive philosophy of iif<
which we can gather from his weekly commentary upon passio.
events for nearly twenty years.

The essays of Robert Lynd are to be found in The Pleasure
of ignorance (1921), Collected Essays (1923), The Money Bo-
(1925), The Green Man (1928), It is Fine world (1930). Hia «^say
ate personal in character and reveal his likes and distitres on :

I 419 )

v*ciety of subjects. They ate matked with a note of sincerity.
«Those who knew him,” teroatks A. S. Collins, “have testified to
the natutal sincetity and steeling wotth of the man, and his
essays ate the man.” He knew himself well and thete was no
conflict in his personality. "At ease with the wotld and himself"
says A. S. Collins, “he wtote with a detachment that gives a
timeless wisdom to his commentaty on life. Unlike so many
tf his contempotaties, he did not want to change the world, but
only to encoutage it to live, sanely, decently and happily."
Ke wtote about his memoirs and experiences, but his essays are
not disfigured by egotism. He writes with modesty and as though
he has infinite leisure.

It is a characteristic of Robert Lynd to be timeless. He has
the same broad and enduring appeal which he enjoyed in his
life time. The charm of his essays lies in his twinkling humour
which is not away from irony. Though he was humane and
tolerant, yet he had an ironic whip for cant and humbug, bunkum
and brutality, malice and intoletence. His reflections on flotsam
and jetsam of life ate sometimes grave, though often they ate
marked with gaiety and gusto.

Lynd is a writer of fine, critical prose, and his essay on
Modern Poetry exhibits his insight into modern poetry and poetic
treads. His observations on poets also seem to be convincing
because he has a way of saying that is very convincing. His
estimate of Walter Dc la Mare is a specimen of sound judgment
and charming style. “Of a4 contemporary poets, there is none
who is so obviously the poet of home- sickness as Mr. De la Mate.
He is the poet of love shackled with vain longing for lovely
things that pass, for love that passes. He draws consolation,
however from the fact that, though things pass, they pass in a
perpetuity of beauty.”

It is not easy to label Robert Lynd for he will be sure to
mislay it. In the words of Richard Church, “Examine his essays,
and you will see how he builds up an argument by a skilful
illustration of exceptions; how he reabsorbs those exceptions,
and closes down with a neat, swift stroke that shows no temporia^g
hand. With all his tolerance, Lynd is implacable in his detestation
of bunkum and bruulity. His taste is unerring. As a critic of

( 420 )

morah and aft he is stable because he knows his own instinct
and theie foundations in a tradition which he can defend tuH
and consciously. Sanity, a deep penetrating humour born ftor
a love of his fellowmen, a quick appreciation of nature, thes
are faculties of an essayist who perhaps pleases himself in bein
deceptive. His depth, like that of a* clear pool into si^hich th
sun is shining, is greater than it seems. Such is Robert Lync
still eluding the critic.”

Prose Style :

^*Very early in his career Robert Lynd cultivated th
qualities that stood him in good stead as an author. He cultivatei
and disciplined his language and he is never careless in writin
even a single sentence. The chief fault of journalism, th
*slip-8hod' writing, is never the fault of Lynd. His sentence
are all neatly turned out and evenly balanced. Lynd belongs
to Ireland and it will not be out of place to mention that som
of the purest prose writers of English have been Irish by birtli
Swift and Shaw — to name only two of a crowded galaxy— hav
given to English Literature a prose the like of which is hard t(
find in English”. J. B. Priesthy says, *'Mr. Lynd’s prose ha
variety, modulation, like all good prose^ it has a rhy^thm of it
Occasionally it descends into “snip-snap”, but, general!}
beneath its quite ease and gentle '*hurry of the spirit”, there i
some very delicate modulation, and a certain characteristic rbythn
that turns his prose into a voice.*'

The style of Robert Lynd is thoroughly conversational
pleasing and not un mixed with humour and irony. His love o
epigrammatic sentences, his clarity and lucidity, his sense o
balance, the use of similes, the, phrase-making gift are th
outstanding qualities of his prose style.

A. G. Gardiner (1865—1946)

Popularly known as Alpha of the Plough, A. G. Gardine
was a journalist and an essayist of great repute and wide appeal
He was the editor of the Daily News from 1902 to 1919* He wron
a book on the prominent personalities of the time and called i
^Propheis, Priests and Kings/ His typical collection of essay:
such as Pebbles on the Shore (1916) and Leaves in the wind (1920,
are the light easy talk of an ordinarily thoughtful

( 421 )

Asftn essayist Gazdinei assumed the role of a preacher and
a moralist. As Addison wrote for the correction of 18th century
manners and society, Gardiner wrote for uplifting the manners
and morals of the war- ridden English society. It was a delicate
task because people are not prepared to listen to sermons.
Fortunately Gardiner could claim a cheerful disposition, a
facile pen, a style that could win the confidence of his readers.
He never tried to impose his views upon the reader. He did not
show that he was preaching. He simply suggested in his own
sly manner what he wanted his readers to practise. He was
teaching when he was trying to delight and entertain his readers.
He won the confidence of his readers by using many simple
anecdotes, incidents and stories. In his essay *On Courage’ he
emphasised upon well-calculated sacrifice for the sake of the
nation by narrating the story of the sailor, who in cold blood,
accepted death for the sake of another sailor. His was an
example of marvellous courage and through this incident the
writer taught the lesson of sacrifice for others.

A* G. Gardiner is one of the most lovable and pleasar i
writers of English essays. Each essay of Gardiner is a source
of pure pleasure. For Gardiner any subject was good enough
for writing and he wrote with perfect case, confidence and
grace. The subject-matter of his essays may be trifling but the
attention of the reader never flags. He engages the attention
of the reader from the beginning to the end of his essay, and
this he does by the charm of his intimate, confessional style. To
quote W. L. Phelps, "It is an intimate, confessional styie of
composition, where the writer takes the reader into confidence,
and talks as if to only one listener talks too, about thing often
essentially trivial, and yet making them for the moment
interesting by the charm of the speaker’s manner.”

The essays of Gardiner arc marked with a note of pleasant
humour. His humour is not away from satire. His pen was
dipped in gall. He criticised the system of justice in his country.
In the essay On Rumour" the school master was the pecy of *‘the
lying tongue of rumour.” His wife committed suicide. ‘‘And
the jury did riot say ‘killed by slander’ they said, “Suicide while
of unsold mind’. Oh 1 Cautious jurymen 1” Only three words

( 422 )

they ace bat they speak volumes of the legal system of England.
His pen did not spare, when a question of principles was involved,
even the biggest person living or dead. His sarcasm in the words
'I love the subtleties of the ingenious Mr. Belloc* is noteworthy.

Gardiner's descriptive vein finds an equally good exposition
in his essays. He is particularly interested in describing the
sights and scenes of nature in his essays, and his descriptions
are exquisitely beautiful. Here is a sample of his descriptive
power — ‘‘The far horizon was still-stained wine-red with the
last embers of the day; northward over the shoulder of the hill
the yellow moon was rising full-orbed into the night sky and the
firmament glittered with a thousand lamps."

Prose Style :

Gardiner’s prose style is the secret of his charm. The charm
of his essays lies in the choice of words, the happy phrasing and
the simple sentence construction. He uses very simple vocabulary
and the reader moves on from word to word, from sentence to
sentence without the slightest effort. This effortless ease is the
first quality of Gardiner's style. He makes use of simple words.
In his essay *On Big Words’ he has explained his attitude to the
choice of words. “It is an excellent thing," says he, “to have
a good vocabulary, but one ought not to lard one’s common

speech or every day letters with long words We do not

make a thing more impressive by clothing it in grand words any
more than we crack a nut more neatly by using a sledge hammer;
we only distract attention from the thought to the clothes it
wears. If we are wise our wisdom will gain from the simplicity
of our speech, and if we are foolish our folly will only shout the
louder through big words." '*A fine use ot words,” he remarks
a little latter, “does not necessarily mean the use of fine

words Quite ordinary words employed with a certain

novelty and freshness can wear distinction that gives them not
only significance but a strange and haunting beauty.'’

Gardiner writes with great charm and ease and his prose
has the qualities of a good talk. He enlivens his essays by
using stories and anecdotes and by his subtle use of humour and
light satire. He also makes a wonderful use of adjectives. * A
world of gigantic wisphers’ *a frenzy of rejoicing/ the lying

( 423 )

tongue of rumoui:’ have vividness and clarity tnat impress the
reader. Above all, his sentence structure is very simple — "What we
have to guard against in this matter of rumours is the natural
tendency to believe what we want to believe.*' It is so cleat
and so telling. The reader feels that he has often thought of it
but never could express it so well. Simple words, simple
phrases, and simple sentences have a magic of their own. And
in this lies the wide appeal of A. G. Gardiner.

Max Beerboh m- ( 1872- 1956).

Max Beerbohm, the Oxford man who won thundering
popularity by his Zuleika Dobson (1911) which shook Oxford,
was a delightful essayist, an entertaining parodist and a dramatic
critic. In his Christmas Garland he has parodied the styles and
writings of A, C. Benson, Wells, Conrad, Bennett, Shaw and a
dozen other writers. He had the art of picture painting and
could portray the mind of a contemporary in a phrase. He had
the vision of a penetrating critic. He excelled in wit, irony and
exposure of the foibles of hit own times and that of the Victorian
age. "In an age of hurry he never hurried; in a machine age he
preserved in his writings and drawings the delicate craftwork of
a more leisured and less strenuous time; in an age when most
people could write moderatly well, but few had anything to write
about, he was perfect both in manner and matter.”*

*'He holds a high place among twentieth century essayists :
he is completely original, whereas others carried on the tradition
of the early nineteenth century periodical essayists. He is a
creative critic of literature and life, with a generous streak of
special genius ; a philosophic jester bursting bubbles of snobbery
and pretence with wit and irony and satire. He played little
if any part in the social and political turmoil of his time ; but
little escaped his notice. He could portray the mind of a
contemporary in a phrase and with a few strokes of the pencil fix
both body and soul upon paper.’***

Style •

Simplicity, economy, rhythm and balance are the hall
marks of Max Beerbohm's prose style. His diction is as simple

* A. C. Ward— “Twentieth Century Literature.

** Ibid.

(.*•»)

as the Bible. He has the powec to captivate the eye of the eeadet
by the very first word of hiS essay and holds it to the last. He
knows the art of placing each word in its place, a Secret known
to only the greatest of English prose-writers. **His prose is as
precise and pure as any in the language, and his wit belongs with
the rarest — with that of Shakespeare* Congreve, Sterne and Oscar
Wilde.*'*

*'Max Beerbohm brushes lightly, delicately, wittily, over
the surface of life, with great tenderness for all that he has
enjoyed, and unfailing humour.” Max Beerbohm is nothing if
not a humorist. He was a humorist Par excellence. He laughed
at the foibles and freaks of human beings but his pea was not
dipped in gall. He was piercingly critical without ever-being
unkindly. He laughed pointedly and without cruelty at the
foibles of men. He laughed where he loved; and loved where he
laughed; but he neither beamed nor sniggered. He was a
sympathetic critic of human foibles, ^*la his observations, and
in his style, there is ^nothing too much’* but there is always just

enough His is the kind of writing which English literature

is supposed not to have ; though in fact there is every kind of
writing in English.

J. B. Priestley (1894— )

Priestley, the critic, is also a fine essayist. His essays find
a place in T for One (1923), Open House (1927), Apes^and
Angles (1928), The Balconinny and other Essays (1929), and
Self-Selected Essays (1932). ‘‘Priestley had a good deal of the
essayist in his make up as a novelist, and in the essay itself the
broad humanity, the shrewd sense of true values of living, the
knowledge of men, the power of narrative and the humour that
were his strength as a novelist appeared in attractive conden-
sation.”4i His essays are literary and critical and his studies on
T. L. Peacock and Meredith (B. M. L.) are penetrating and
sharp. In The English Comic Characters, he “produced a very
happy variation of the essay in evoking some of the great comic

* C. A. Doren and M. V. Doren — American And British Literature
since 1890.

j- R. A. Scott-James — Fifty years of English, Xitersiture.

% Dr. A. S. Collins : English Literature of the 20lih Century*

( 425 )

figures like Toby Belch and his associates and Jane Austin's Mr.
Collins and discussing them as though they were living people.
Indeed nearly all his essays are enriched by allusions drawn
from his wide reading in a manner resembling Hazlitt’s.'**

Priestley writes a familiar and a simple style. His avowed
object is to be simple. ^Deliberately I aim at simplicity and not
complexity in my writing. No matter what the subject in hand
might be, I want to write something that at a pinch I could read
aloud in bar-parlour. (And the time came when I was heard
and understood in a thousand bar-parlours), I do not pretend
to be subtle and profound, but when I am at work I try to appear
simpler than I am. Perhaps I make it too easy for the reader,
do too much of the toiling and sweating myself."

"As a verbal craftsman he is admirable, for he loves his
medium of words and uses them with imagination.”** His choice
of words is happy. His use of epithets, adjectives and participles
has been very happy and his words create humour and provide
an ironical flavour to the whole sentence. Mark the boisterous
humour produced by the word ^bellowed' in the sentence— "But
motor cars and aeroplanes are quite impossible, allowing nothing
but a grim frozen silence occasionally shattered by a bellowed
remark.” His adjectives are very graphic and vivid and some-
times help the reader to form clear, vivid mental images. But
“when his writing glistens with a brilliant aptness of adjective
and felicity of metaphor it is not because he has retired to a
chalet in the mountains of a florentine villa. He has not tied a
scented towel round his head or sat fiddling for a whole morning
vvith the cut of a sentence or the cadence of a line. He has simply
been smoking a pipe and tapping on a type-writer; no exquisite,
museum-worthy manuscripts emerge from Priestley; his hand
writing is bad enough to be unusable and he rarely uses it. He
a worker who employs the machinery of his trade and has a
friendly feeling for those clickety — clack contraptions which
others regards as odious utilities.”

E- V. Knox.

He was the editor of the Punch for several years from

* Kichard Church — British Authors.

** Ibid. -

( 426 )

1932. He was a verse parodist but his essays in prose are hi)
lasting contribution to literature. His essays ate witty and wise
and embody his observation on life.

A A. Milne

His two volumes o;f essays are Not That It Matters (1919), ff
I May (1920). "In comparison with Priestley’s, the essays of A.
A. Milne are considerably slighter, but their whimsical humour
and agreeable sentiment are conveyed by a durable grace of
style and may well make them outwear the years.”*

Here is a typical example of his humorous style—

"Of the fruits of the year I give my vote to the orange

One wonders why ? The answer is convincing enough —

"It is well that the commonest fruit should be also the best.
Of the virtues of the orange I have not room fully to speak.” —
and then he proceeds to enumerate the virtues of the orange.

Alice Meynell (1847—1922).

She was a poetess, a critic and an essayist. Her essays are
reflective and quiet in tone and belong to the Edwardian period.
"The collected Essays of Alice Meynell show that whether she
wrote of Andromeda and Arctursus, of laughter or colours,
children or sleep, her touch was and delicate her vision clear.”**
She was an essayist of an austere and reticent type and her
emotions were well disciplined and expressed in a chiselled
language.

Dean Inge— (1890— )

Dean Inge has to his credit Lay Thoughts of a Dean and
Outspoken Essays 1919 and 1922. Inge began as a journalist
and his articles in the London Evening Standard a jour-

nalistic adaptation of the Baconian essay, being serious thoughts
on serious subjects seen in the light of current events.”t
finest work is to be found in his Outspoken Essays. In these
essays W. R. Inge wrote fearlessly without fear or

favour and each essay bears the stkmp of his strong mind.
He had an argumentative way of putting things and advocated
emigration to decrease over population and the study of eugenics

* A. S. Collins — English Literature of the 20th Century.

** A. C. Ward — Twentieth Cefitury Literature,
t A. S. Collins— English Literature of the 20t)i CentvTty.

( 427 )

to improve the racial stock. He attacked vigorously war-mongers
and militarists and expressed his opinions in a forceful and
categoric manner. Here are a few opinions of Inge which exhibit
his confidence in himself and the surety of touch with which he
expressed them. His views on politics arc radical.

(1) «A nation which gives itself to immoral aggrandize-
ment is far on the road to disintegration. (2) By any national
standard of morality few greater scoundrels have lived than
Fredrick the Great and Napoleon 1. (3) The apotheosis of the
state, whether in the interest of war or of revolution is an
anachronism and an absurdity. (4) To worship the state is to
worship a demon who has not even the redeeming quality of
being intelligent. (5) The freedom of the individual is sacred
and ought to be maintained.’’

The statements of^Inge quoted above exhibit his fearless
nature and his ability to give blows to accepted notions of history
and politics. But when he wrote about religion he wrote from
the heart and exhibited a tender and humble spirit. In judging
the progress of the world he adopted the attitude of a cynic
and in the essay Jdea of Progress he refused to believe that there
has been any progress in the present. He saw a gloomy future
for humanity. He was nicknamed **the gloomy Dean” because
of his pessimistic attitude towards life.

R. A. Scott James nicely sums up the position of Inge as
an Essayist in the following words — **Dean Inge was occupied
mainly in academic studies and the writing of books the most
notable of which were concerned with various aspects of the
history and practice of mysticism. He entered upon a new phase
of activity and descended into the arena of controversial essay*
writing, and in the third and fourth decades of the century
poured forth series of brilliant, combative essays in the best
Edwardian manner proving that no style is out of date when it is
backed by learning, sense for language and sympathy with the
living. His conservatism, his respect for tradition, his dislike
of demagogy, were expressed with a dour franknbss that won for
kirn the sobriquet of the gloomy Dean.”*

* R. A. Sco^ James : Fifty Years of English Literature.

( 428 )

Charles Morgan.

Morgan is an essayist of the artistic and philosophic school,
and his belief is that the world of the spirit means more than the
world of action. His style is, ^‘dreamlike in its slow majestic
movement. It is a confident style without modernism or striving;
very personal in an abstract sort of way; classic, resourceful
diction, searched out images: a Platonic turn of thought and
speech.**

Rebecca West.

Her essays are psychological and deal delicately with
problems of psychological affinities and human institutions. She
is also a satirist and her satire is directed against man and his
affairs. She exhibits a general susceptibility. Her style is
"smooth' flowing, rounded outlines, periodic accomplished : witty
and tastefully wrapped up : but wanton^ full of fresh, charming
concerts : full of apt thoughts verging on the epigrammatic.**
Ernest Hemingway.

He is a realist and his preception of reality is marked with a
note of grimness. His writings suggest despair and casualness.
His style has a clear metallic ring. It is vivid though there is
careful word economy. His style is as stark as his outlook
on life.

E. E. Cummings.

He is a whimsical type ot essayist. "His mind lies open to
catch all chance fancies that hang about the fringes of conscious-
ness.'* He has a scrupulous respect for all the odds and ends of
mind content. His style is impressioni^tic• "It is a medley of
objective and subjestive : much that is clear and graphic^ but
interlarded with personal reactions and allusions that are often
obscure to the reader. Imagist i. e. he tends to use words as a
painter uses colour as a plastic material. There is much poetry
here, too. There is much pretence at simplicity, but it is
not really simple, but highly sophisticated, with a complicated
background showing through, leaving an impression of
precocity by amusing and stimulating work reading like an
interesting dairy.

C. E. Montague.

He is an optimist and hi • essays reveal his love for life. He

( 429 )

inspires us to enjoy life to the full. His essays exhibit bis think
fulness for the goodness of life. ‘‘He writes as one who has good
news : no limitations or narrowness and few doubts.” His style
is “Full flavoured, brilliant, matured.” He is vigorous, scholarly,
rhetorical, cadenced, well- balanced in his writings.

Edmund Blunden.

He is an essayist of the countryside. His essays reveal bis
feeling for all objects of the countryside whether beautiful or ugly,
rare or humdrum. His style is partly heavy, suddenly iighr. He
wrote with deliberation and some of his sentences arc ponderous.
He “makes his own thought about the object rather than the
object itself clear to the reader, and yet he takes the reader
along with him.”

Maurice Baring-

His essays are reminiscent in character and are written in
a leisurely fashion. There are anecdotes and gossips turned out
with an air of detachment. His style is “desiccated and effortless.
It is easy reading, easily digested as it was meant to be : has the
exaggeration and approximation common to most gossip.”

Aldous Huxley (1894—1963)

Aldous Huxley is well-known for his novels. Besides his
novels, he has written quite a good number of essays, short and
witty. Huxley is primarily a writer of satire and irony. One
gets tired of reading his philosophico-satirical novels since they
sting and bite too much. Tkcy arc based on, what Miss Neill calls
an anti’humanitarian Philosophy. But his essays are much more
interesting and plessing to read, inspite of the fact that the
satirical element is never absent from them. His essays are
collected in the volumes called Music at Night and Do What Ycu
Will.

Q. 97. Write a note on Twentieth Century Biography, and
Autobiography and evaluate the work of the prominent Biographers
and Autobiographers of the present age.

Ans. Biography and Autobiography have been very
popular during the 20th century. Till the year 1918 there were
few biographies of distinction and those biographies, which were

( 430 )

also pieces of literature, were few and fat between. It was Lytton
Stracbey (1880—1932) who gave to Eaglisb biography a new
form and shade. His Eminent Victorians (1918) was warmly
received and six reprints were called for in seven months. It was
highly praised and a host of imitators sought to shine in the new
field in which Strachey could break a new ground and achieved
rare success.

What was Lytton Strachey *s method as a biographer ? He
was the first biographer who ‘‘broke away from the heavy lauda-
tory biographical monuments which had become the rule from
Victorian days.” Instead of praising sky-high the heroes of his
biographies as gods of the earth, he examined them critically and
found that they were ordinary men of flesh and blood, and shared
the common foibles and weaknesses of erring human beings. The
eminent Victorians of whom Strachey wrote were Cardinal
Newman, Dr. Arnold of Rugby, General Gordon and Florence
Nightingale. These were Victorian idols of whorship and were
then the object of public veneration. They had been idolised by
the Victorians. It was Strachey’s job to examine their work
critically and bring them out in their true colours. He took them
off their pedastals. He made statements about bis figures which
staggered and shook the people of his times. ‘He had salutary
things to says; be said them provocatively and without romantic
embroidery.’ ‘*He saw them instead as very human figures with
amusing weaknesses, with comedy in their gcandeur. He shone a
strong searchlight on them, which caught them off their guard and
revealed details thatt he sober conventional biographers had
thought unworthy of notice or better, omitted.”* So viewed the
Eminent Victorians ceased to be V. I. Ps. For example Florence Night
ingale had been idolised as the Lady of the Lamp, who had been
extremely kind and generous to the soldiers. But Strachey showed
that “She was the Lady of the Lamp in her spare moments. At
other times she was an Angel of Wrath armed with thunderbolts,
which she never hesitated to throw.”f Thus, what signalises
the work of Strachey is the ironic art and the Stracheyan irony
became famous during the 20th century. Men of the older

* A. S. Collins : English Literature of the 20th Century,
f A C. Ward : Twentieth Century Literature.

{ 431 )

generation denounced Stcachey’s ironical portraiture of idolised
Victorian characters but their denunciation could have no effect
on Strachcy and his followers. The success that greeted Stcachey
in his first venture inspired him to write another biography, this
time of the popular Queen Victoria tthe picture of Queen Victoria
is sympathetically drawn. Queen Victoria is, movingly human
revelation of the queen and the woman, leaving her, for all his
ironic manner, a figure to be liked and admired, and presenting
his portrait in far fewer pages than had formerly been considered
necessary for serious biographical work/’'<^ Elizabeth and Essex
(1928) followed Queen Victoria. Here he seems “rather out of his
depth historically.” His Portraits in if Mature (1931) is a collection
“of relatively slight sketches incuding brief studies of some of the
older English historians.” Stcachey’s style is sweeping and the
sentences arc winding. His style may appear a little teasing
because of his longwinded sentences, but “if the winding
sentences were made straight by reducing the number of adjectives
and qualifying phrases, the ‘superfluous’ word would often carry
away with them that pervasive irony which runs through every
line and is the spirit of Lytton Strachey’s prose.”**

Strachey’s great achievement had been to give to Biographical
Literature a new life and a new form. He reinstated biography as
a literary art and presented truth from a personal perspective in a
dazzling style full of colour and contrast. His followers could
not be very successful for they “aped his irreverence of approach
and his dazzle of style without sharing his power of penetrating
and illuminating the subject.”^

Phillip Gaedalla (1889—1944)

He was considerably influenced by the example of Strachey,
and though not actually his disciple, at least shared some of his
principles, Strachey had stated that biography is ‘the most
delicate and humane of all the branches of the art of writing’.
Guedalla said, “Biography is the painting of portraits and it is
impossible to paint them without a touch of art,”

The biographical sketches of Guadella are x^ittily drawn and
they startle us by their continual glitter of wit. In his Supers and

* A, S. Collins : English Literature of the 20th Century
** A. C. Ward : Twentieth Century Literature

( 432 )

Supermen (1920), Masters and Men (1922) and A Gallery^ there arc
fine sketches of Victorians and their contemporaries. We have
pictures of Disraeli, Lord Asquith, Hardy and Wells. What makes
these pictures and portraits somewhat unsatisfactory is the witty
way of the author. Strachey had combined matter with manner^
but Guedalla was all for manner of expression rather than for subs-
tance. *^His subjects deserved something better than the manner
of a brilliant undergraduate, irresponsibly scoring point after
point in a tone of super amusement.*’ Guedalla was **capable of
sense and brilliance toi^cther, but he played about with words
recalling the worst mannerisms of Oscar Wilde, Chesterton and
Lytton Strachey. ‘‘These defects were mitigated to some extent
in his lull studies of Palmerston (1926) and The Duke of Wellington
in (1931)- In these works Guadella had toned down his witticism.
He became sober and his treatment “preserving only the merits
of the new approach, admirably matched his subjects.**

Sir Osbert Sitwell (1892—).

Osbert Sitwell brought out the history of his own family in
five volumes. Left Hand, Right Hand^ (1945), The Scarlet Tree
(1946), Great Morning (1948), Laughter in the Next Room (1949).
In J950 Sitwell added the fifth volume Noble Essence which was
not in the original plan. In these volumes we have portraits of
Sitwell’s father, friends and relatives. These works of Sitwell
reveal his love for the past and his disgust for the present. He
seems to be writing an elegy upon “that halcyon age in which he
grew up” in contrast to the present age which seems to him “this
cruel and meaningless epoch.” He is all for Victorianism and
states, “1 should like to emphasise that I want my memories to be
old fashioned and extravagant — as they arc.” In his vision of
the Victorians there is none of the irreverence of Strachey. He has
rather a great reverence for the old Victorians and is a pleasant
contrast to Strachey.

Among the other important biographical works of the
20th century place must be given to Lord David Cecil’s The
Stricken Deer which deals with the life of the poet Cowper and
the T^^o Quiet Lives (1948) dealing with Gray and his contempo-
rary, Collins, Virginia Woolf’s Life of Roger Fry (1940), Peter
QucnnelTs Byron Italy (1940) and Four Portraits (1945), Scan

( 433 ^

ckascy’s F Knock at the Door (1939); Duff Cooper’s Talleyrand
(1932). St. John Brwine’s Parnell^ Edmund Gosse’s Father and
Son (1907) Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis (1905); George Gissing’s
The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903); Sasson’s The
\4emoirf of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928) and Tim Memoirs of an
Infantry Officer (1930); H. G. Wells’s Experiment in Autobiography
(1934); J. B. Barrie’s The Greenwood Hat (1937); Rudyard
Kipling’s Something af Myself (1937); Havelock Ellis’s My Life
(1940); Arthur Bryant’s Charles II (1921) and Samuel Pepysx
Michael Sadlein’s Trollop? (1927); P. P. Aowe’s Hazlitt (1922);
John Buchan’s Montrose (1918); Oliver Cromwell (1938) and
Augusts (1937); Robert Grave’s Goodbye To dll That (1929).

Q 98 Write a note on the Literature of Travel during
the 20ih Century

Ans ‘*No language is richer than English in the literature
of travel, and its reputation has been well sustained in the
last thirty years.”* The Arab countries of the Middle East
have exercised a fascination on the minds of English travellers
who have enriched literature by their accounts of the Arabian
people. ^*The desert sceile, the Arab temperament, the enduring
monuments of ancient civilizations, the survival of patriarchal
habits which seem familiar to all versed in the Old Testament”
are brought out in the works of these English travellers to the
east in whom the love of practical adventure is combined with the
love for the romantic and the mystical conspicuously present in
the East. To this class belong Burton’s Pilgrimage to Mecca,
Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta Gertrude Lowthian Bell’s
The Desert and the Sun and T. E. Lawrence’s The Seven
Pillars of Wisdom (1935), together with the fine writings of Freya
Stark, Bertram Sidney Thomas.

T. £. Lawrence ( 888 — 193 j

Lawrence’s work is the most significant of the travel liter-
ature of the 20th century. Lawrence became a legend and a man
of mystery in Arabia and round his name many rumours were
woven,. He was loved and admired by the Arabs whom he greatly

* R. A. Scott-James : Fify Years of English Literature.

( 434 )

helped in organising against the mighty forces of the Turks.

The Seven Pillars of Wisdom is a historic book and is an
epic in prose recounting vividly and enthusiastically the glorious
fights of the Arabs against the Turks, and the primitive manners
and customs of the Arabs which remind one of the details of
Odyssey and Beowulf The author succeeds eminently m
presenting subtle analysis of the characters of the chiefs and the:
generals of the Arabs such as Feisal, the conscious artist among
leaders. Auba, a Diomede of the Arabs, and Abdulla rhe soul ot
the warriors marching by devious ways towards Damascus. The
epic theme of the book has been well handled, and it is full ot
heroes of the ///W, the author himself being the Achilles oi the
Arabs The book is extremely egotistical in character and
reveals considerably the author who succeeded in the unification
of the Arabs against the Turks and in guiding them to their
triumph. In this book the man and the matter are interlinked
and it reveals as much of Lawrence as the sandy desert oi
Arabia. ‘‘The ultimate source of the distinction of the book is
the impact upon one of the most complex and problematical of
3ersonalities of a great heroic experience. The result may best
be regarded as a modern prose epic, unique example of the
appearance of a heroic narrative in ah era disinclined to the
L^rand style.”* The style of the author is vivid and graphic and
s marked with a note of grandeur rarely to be found in travel-
literature. Lawcrence’s book is “probably the greatest non-
[maginative narrative to appear in the interval between the two
world wars,”

H. M Tomilson (187 — ),

Toniilson is another great contributor to the travel lite-
*ature of the ZOth century. He made a name for himself by his
rhe Sea and the Jungle (1912) in which he recounted his voyage
South America right up into the heart of the jungle. London
River (1921) gives a vivid and appreciative account of a port
vhose ships sailed to the Seven Seas. Tidemarks{191^) has its
ubtitle, “some records of a journey to the beaches of the
vfohiccas and the forest of Malaya.** In Face of the Earth

‘ Moody-Lovett : A History of English Literature.

( 435 )

(1950) Tomilson describes vividly his trip from England to Spain
in a small vessel in the company of a few friends. Malaya Waters
(1951) is an enthralling work in which the courage and endurance
of sailors in the second world war who had gone out to fi^ht in
exotic land has been vividly and heroically presented, ‘ in these
and all his books Tomilson writes as a born traveller, who might
have been bred in the traditions of the sea, as one who knows
all the technicalities of seamanship and who is moreover a most
observant man of all the encounters. He never overwrites, but
bis style is the mao, original, philosophical, humorous.”

Sacheverell Sitwell (1897—).

Sitwell, the poet, is a writer of many travel books of
literature. His books include Southern Baroque Art (1924), The
Gothic North (1929—30). Towhing the Orient (1934), Prime Scenes
and Festivals (1935). The spirit of Sacheverell Siiwell is very
much different from that of Tomilson, Whereas Tomilson
loved travel and sea voyage for its own sake and for the joy of
adventure, Sitwell loves not so much the journey and the
adventure, as the people and the scenery of foreign countries.
He is interested in the art, architecture, music, literature, festivals
of the countries visited by him. He identifies himself with the
countries he visited and becomes one of them. ‘ He likes to slip
Iro n the present into the remote past, and loves especially those
places ani those peoples where the past can still be felt below the
surface, and even on the surface of the present. Then his spirit
broods in enchanted contemplation, his prose takes on music,
while the scene rises before our eyes in all its sensuous detail in a
shimmeting tapestry of words.”* Ilis selection of his own prose
writing in Phe Homing of the Winds (1942) forms a fine introduc-
tion to his general works. Sitwell's style is poetic in character
and be writes in the following manner— “Where, then, is wisdom ?
In the arts, and not in war. In the cold and not in the heat. In
this music and its lilies. In the arts and in the senses. In the
bright wing and in the golden leaf.”

Hilaire Belloc ( 870- 9 )

Belloc's two works Path To Rome and Cruise of the Nona
Dr. A. S Collins : English Literature of the 20th Century.

( <36 )

belong to the literature of travel. The Path to Rome^ a rambling
gossipy book, written in unornamented but pictorial prose;
without much set or formal descriptive comment, yet clearly
suggesting the widely differing appearance and character of places
and people.”* The book describes the author’s journey on foot
from Toul, down the valley of the Moselle, to Italy. It brings in
a graphic manner the hills and valleys, rivers and trees and
churches, of the countries that come in the way of Belloc’s journey
to Rome.

Cunninghame Graham (1852 — 1936)

The travel accounts of Cunninghame Graham are about
Scottish life and chiracter. ‘^His pages are vigorous as life itself.
While Hudson is placid and meditative, with passages sweet as
birdsong, Graham is turbulent and acrid and explosive, restless
as the broken waters of a mountain stream falling over jagged
rocks.”** He has presented the East in Mogreb^el Acksa, and
From the Mouth of the Sahara^ and his descriptions in these two
hooks are poetic and illuminating. Here is an example of
Cunninghame Graham’s descriptive vein in his eastern tales
of travel.

^*The night descended (xn the town and the last gleams of
sunlight flickering on the walls turned paler, changed to violet
and grey, and the pearl- coloured mist creeping up from the palm
woods outside the walls enshrouded everything.”

The travel records of Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence
and Graham Crreene have already been discussed in the
section of modern Fiction. Among other writers who have
contributed to Travel Literature of the 20th century, reference
ought to be made to Norman Doughla’s Old Calabria (1915) and
his other books about the Mediterranean area, Freya Stark who
wrote about Arabia, Rosita Forbes whose accounts of Egypt and
the East ate picturesque and entertaining. H. V. Morton in hi«
Steps Of The Master (1934) and In the Steps of St» Pual (1936)
also added to the travel literature of our times and his works

* A. C. Ward— Twentieth Century Literature.

** Ibid,

( 437 ^

togethec with the novels of Evelyn Wange tnake an interestiDg
reading.

Q. 99. Who are . the prominent writers of Nature and
country life in prose during the 20th Century ? Give a brief
account of any two of the prominent figures of this species of
literature

Ads. The writers who have chosen to glorify Nature and
country life in theic works are many in number* the prominent
of them being W. H. Hudson* Edward Thomas, Siegfried Sasson*
H. J. Massingham, Sir William Beach Thomas, A. G. Steer,
George Sturt* Alison Uttley, Robert Gibbiogs, Erie Parker,
Biluned Lewis and Henry Williamson. We svill deal with the work
of W. H. Hudson, the great naturalist and Henry Williamson,
the writer of wild life in some detail.

William Henry Hudson (1841 — 1922) ,

William Henry Hudson, the eminent naturalist and romancer
and also an essayist was born in the Pampas of La Plata. The
remarkable variety of his work makes it difficult to buckle Hudson
on the belt of conventional classifications. Yet his endowments
have entitled him to a place- among the front rank writers of
English prose. This unobtrusive and contemplative writer who
shunned the drums of publicity and kept a noiseless tenor of his
way in the hospitable recesses of the countryside and Nature,
which was his ‘element’* did not produce that popular type of
literature that takes a reading world by storm. His recognition
was, no wonder* late in coming. But once his works had been
read by the public, he found his place in English' Literature
because he was not only a naturalist and romancer but also a
Stylist of the first water. His passionate sense of devotion to
truth* with his absorption in noting natural phenomena* joined
to a supreme power of self-expression, is what enlarges and
enriches bis special contribution to English Literature. To
convey this ecstasy of living, the appreciation of visible beauty
in earth* sea and sky, is the finest gift of God to man. It is
Hud 8011*8 endowment as a writer that he is able to communicste
part of his delight and inspiration to lesser men and womeo*

( 438 )

in a language as moving and pellucid as a crystal stream.

W. H. Hudson has given a vivid account ot
his life in the Pampas in Far Away and Long ago (1918).
His love for Nature is seen at his best in The Naturalist in L i
Plata (1892), Idle Days in Patagonia (1893) and in Green
Mansions (1904) which is a beautiful account of South American
life. Hud son specialised in the study of birds and several of his
books deal with birds. Among these books on birds three are
significantr-^fir/Zw/j Birds (1895), Birds in London 1898), Birds
and Man (1901). Hudson’s other works dealing with Nature and
countryside are The Land's End (1908), A Shepherd's Life (1910),
A Traveller In Little Things (1921) and A Hind in Richmond
Park (1922)

Hudson was a keen and observant lover of nature. He was
"^a patient and solitary watcher of Nature.’ He took keen interest
in the observation and appreciation of wild life, especially ot
birds, but in his view, all wild life *‘was a part of the human
scene, and, as his writing advanced, birds, animals, and insects
were only one strand on his very detailed picture of English life.”
His A Shepherd's Life is the best of his nature books, and here
he fakes us to the heart of nature and country life. Hudson took
keen delight in everything lovely and beautiful in nature. His
delight in life was not *‘an occasional impulse, but a conviction
declared in his works from first to last,”

Style :

Hudson’s writings cast such a spell on men of letters that
they found him the most enchanting of modern prose writers.
“As a stylist he (Hudson^ has few, it any living equals,” remarked
Gdlsworthy.* A. S. Collins also says, “He writes the purest
English prose style of the century scientifically precise without
jargon, sensitive without aestheticism, concrete and detailed
without loss of colour and ease.”**

There is i majestic maturity about Hudson’s style, which
is apparent in almost every book he wrote with the unmistakable
seal of his di-^tinctive genius. Afoot in England is perhaps the
perfect book to choose as an epitome of that style, and to study

♦ Foreword to Hudson’s For Away And Long Ago (1918)

A. S Collins— English Literature of the Twentieth century.

( 439 )

its attributes of effortless simplicity, piercing insight and
imaginative majesty. He has a descriptive charm. He is also
a master of delicate, concise and clear style especially in recording
his observations. Galsworthy says, “To use words so true and
simple, that they oppose no obstacle to the flow oi thought and
feeling from mind to mind, and yet by juxtaposition ol word
sounds set up in the recipient continuing emotion or
gratification— this is the essence of style; and Hudson’s writing
has pre-eminently this double quality.”

Conrad once remarked that Hudson “writes down his words
as the good God makes the green grass to grow, and that is alt
you will ever find to say about it if you try for ever ” His style
appears like a slowly attained acquisition as the pigments of
a chaffinch or a sun beetle or the grace with which a harebell
grows. Hudson had, of course, the great advantage of ncing
the possessor of an astonishingly uniform style; it is difficult
to trace any marked development or decline in the literary
craftsmanship of the author. Date of composition means little
in any critical consideration of the quality of Hudson's prose.
With him there are no object failures to be considerately dis-
missed from examination with the explanation “apprentice work.”
Who would be presumptuous enough to pass such a sentence on
‘The Purple Land’ (1885). And certainly he never afforded that
most melancholy of all literary spectacles — the unwitting exhibi-
tion of powers in evident decay and decline. The po^thumous
volume Hind in Richmond Park’ (1922) is perhaps the most
profound in its philosophy and psychology of the entire scries,
and it was the work of a man in the eighties.

To sum up in the words of Kessler, “I have been reading
Hudson with growing delight. Much as I admire f^onrad, Yeats,
Hardy and some others, he is to me the greatest living master
of noble English. In his simplicity, directness and grace he
reminds me of the great Attic writers of prose narrative; his
phrase flows with the same exquisite limpidity, every image
siurging up in its right place and perfect in proportion. Every-
body else’s style sounds affected in comparison; he docs not seem
to care how he writes, but to be like the Greeks, naturally

( 440 )

perfect.^*

Henry WiUianuon ( 897—).

Williamson is another great lover of the countryside and
wild life. He wrote a number of books on wild life and the
country side. The chief of his works are The Love SwoUows
(1922), rhe Old Stage and Tarka the Other. The last named book
is ^an unrivalled book of ics kind/ Williamson wa^ an artist
and whatever emerged from his pen was fastidiously written.
His observation of nature was careful and his expression of the
charms of nature was sincere. He was strongly opposed to
materialism and machine life. He, **felt the disease of modern
civilization and was especially conscious of the urbin materialism
which was antagonistic to the former and therefore to the heart
of England.”

Q. 100. Write a note on the Historical prose and the works
of the historians of the 20th Century

Ans. During the twentieth century there has been a rapid
growth of historical writing, and many famous historians of the
age have brought this kind of prose writing to a very high s^an'
dard. Some writers have brought a fusion of biography and history
in their works. Lytton Strachey's historical biographies of Queen
Victoria and the Eminent Victorims enter the province of history.
Arthur Bryant in his Charles II portrayed not only the king but
also the age in which gaiety and raillery had reached a high
water mark. In his English Stage he made a comprehensive
survey of English life and history from 1840 co 1890. In bis
The Years of Endurance and Years of Victory, he presented the
conflict between England and France from 1793 to 1812. G. M
Trevelyan is a great historian of the 20th century and his two
remarkable achivements are History of England (1926) and English
Social History (1943). He completed the history of Queen Anne
which Macaulay, his great relative, could not complete. ,G G
Coulton (1853— 1947 was the historian of the Middle Ages and
his two rematk»ble works are Chaucer and his England and Five
Centuries of Religion. He presented a new view of the Middle

* Quoted by Samuel J. Looker in Worthing Cavalcade^ p. 40.

( 441 )

J^gcs and "with his vast leatniog robustly counteccd the idcalis-
Ii 0 g Catholic interpretation of the Middle Ages as presented by
hesterton.” A. L Rowse (1903 — ) is an academic historian of
le modern age and his The Spirit Of English History (1943) is
good work in historical writing. Hie achieved distinction by
xoiadtig The England of Elizabeth in (1851) “in which, apart
com his defective understanding of the religious spirit in indi
iduals, he shows that masterly power of handing history which
rings historical writing within the sphere of literature." H. A.

Fisher’s History af Europe (1935), H. Butter Field’s Christianity
\nd History (1949), Deins Brogan’s The Development of Modern
^rance (1870 — 1939) and The American Problem are examples
)f comprehensive historical portrayal of the men and events of
hese countries.

Among economic historians R. H. Tawney and Barbara
dammod stand out prominently. Constitutional history has been
|ittempted by Sir Maurice Powiche and J. B. Neale.

H« G. Wells and Winston Churchill have been professional
t academic historians. Sir James Frazer and A. J Toynbee arc
thei remarkable historians of the modern age and they have
en endowed with originality and brilliance. Frazer was scien-
ific and Toynbee is philosophical in his approach to history,
’tazer's (1854—1931) The Golden Bough is a great work of
istory. It is stupendous in its scope. It presents ^‘a massive
ccumulation of well sifted knowledge of ancient civilaztions and
timitive societies, their religions, myths and legends, from
lich theologians, philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists
idents of the classics and creative writers could all draw
luable material." Toynbee in his A Study of History in six
>lutnes studied the entire history of ancient civilizations and by
s study of the rise and fall of previous civilizations he sought
deduce a comprehensive philosophy of history. Toynbee’s
itook is religious and he gives us the warning that if the forces
militarism and materialism continue to advance with the
^pendous speed with which they arc going apace, the day is not

! ' off when the whole fabric of civilization will topple down and
again 'man will relapse to the old days of barbarism and
bism.. . 7 We mhst listen to the voice of these great historians

( 442 }

and formulate our lives ia the light of their observation about
civilisation and human society.

Q. 101. Give a brief account of the Scientific and philoso-
phic Literature of the 20th Century.

Ans. There has been a phenomenal growth of scientific
and philosophic literature during the 20th century. Many scientists
of our times can favourably be compared with such Victorian
giants as Huxley, Darwin and Tyndall. The impact of modern
science has been palpably felt in all branches of life and learning.
'^The impact of the new science fell particularly on religion and
ethics, but its effects extended to every sphere, especially in the
rapidly developing study of sociology, and the practical bearing
of the new science upon society demanded consideration.”*

Among the modern scientists A. N. Whitehead (1861 — 1947)
occupies a distinctive place. He was a mathematician and a
leading exponent of the philosophic approach. His main works
arc The Concept of Nature (1920), The Principfe of Relalivit)
{1922), Science and the Modern ^orld (1926), Process and Realin
(1929), Sir Janies Jeans (1877 — 1946) attracted attention by his
widely read books-TAe Universe Around Us (1929) and The
Mysterious Universe (1930). In these books Jeans has given ao
interesting view of the heavens and the planets and his style of
presentation is lucid and clear. He can be easily followed for be
seeks to unfold the picture of the sun, and the universe in ao
mcecasting manner. Sir Arthur Eddington (1882 — 1944), mathe-
cnatician, physicist and astronomer, produced great works like
The Nature of Physical World (1928), Science and the Unseen
World (1929) and The Expanding Universe (1933). Julian Huxley
(1877 — ) the great biologist, wrote fine essays on scientific subjects
and he is rightly popular by his Essays of a Biologist (\92yji
Essays in a Popular Science (1926), Man in the Modern WorU
( 1947 ). He also collaborated with H. G. Wells and his soa
G. P. Wells in the production of The Science qf f^jfe (1929)
Soviet Genetics and World Science ( 1949 ). . Huxley Is n t^c^ougb

going materialist and does not believe in Go^ w, the >€^^tro^
Dr. A. S. CoIlins-^English Literatua^ of the

( 443 )

tad mice of the vodd.' He also has little faith in the imiaattality
of the soul and teligious salvation through Nirvana. J. B. S.
tfaldane (1892—) made n3tible contribution to the world of
scientific literature by writing. Possible Worlds (1927), Science
and Ethics (1928 * The Causes of Evolution (1933) *nd Science
and Everyday Life (1939), Lancelot Hogben (1895) a biologist
like Huxley and Haldane produced two great works Mathematic:^
for the Million (1936), and Science for the Citizen (1939). Besides
these prominent writers on the subject of science, we have in thc
20th century a host of other scientific writers, the chief of them
being F. Hoyle, Sir Olivet Lodge, Sit Richard Gregory, Sir
Arthur Keith and J. D. Bernal.

i

Among the philosophical and scientific writers of the 20th
century, Bertrand Russell (1872 — ) occupies a very high place.
Ke is a ^ scientist, mathematician, philosopher and political
thinker of the highest order. He is the author of a number of
valuable works, the chief of them being : —

1. Philosophical Essays (1910)* 2. Problems of Philosophy
(1911) 3« Principles of Social Reconstruction (1917). 4. Mysticism
And Logic (1918). 5. Roads to Freedom (1918). 6. Our Know-
ledge of the External World (1919). 7. An Introduction to

Mathematical Philosophy (1919) 8. The Practice and Theory of
Bolshevism (1920). 9. The Analysis of Mind (1921). 10. The
Problem of China (1922). 11. The Prospects of Industrial Civi-
lization (1923). 12 On Education (1926). 13. An Outline of

Philosophy (1927). 14. Why I Am Not a Christian (1927). 15.
Marriage and Moral (1929). 16. Conquest of Happiness (1930).

17. The Scientific Outlook (1931). 18. Education and the Social
Order (1932). 19. Freedom and Organisation (1934). 20. Power,
A New Social Analysis (1934). 21 A History of Western Philosophy
(1934). 22- An Enquiry into the Meaning of Truth (1934).
Z3. Human Knowledge : Its Scope and Limits (1948)
14. /\ut;hority and the Individual (1949). 25. Unpopular

Essays (1950).

Russell is hue of those writers who hi^ not yet been
properly 'understood. His unorthodox opin* • have been
scclaiined by fire thinkers as a g^at advance in n >doca thought,
while the bpiniolis have been condemned v' *thers as the

( 444 >

tesult of his coa fused thinking on vital .and impoctant issues of
life. Hence arhile in certain quarters his books have been hailed
as a valuable contribution to the solution of the world’s complex
problems, in others they have been received with utmost protest
and indignation. Inspite of all these difFeiences about his works
^ it has been agreed among critics that Russell has always been
inspired by the, love of truth in his investigations. As the Times
Literary Supplement once said, he has way of asking right
question and making the people think hard about them, whether
they accept his solutions of these questions or not.” It will be
interesting, therefore, to examine his views a little critically and
see what panacea he ofTcrs for the ills of this troubled passionate
planet.

Russell is dissatisfied with the present state of our society.
He has found that there is something radically wrong with
modern life. He has been deeply afflicted to note the hypocrisy,
falsehood, and injustice prevaling in our society. The capitalistic
system of society with its complete hold on the labourers, who
have been denied all leisure and happiness by the capitalists, has
mortified Russell. War and v^iolence in modern international life
have equally touched the heart of this greit thinker. The system
of modern education with numerous defects in our university life
has equally stirred the thoughts of Russell. He has given consi-
derate thought to the solution of these various maladies of out
social and economic life. He is primarily concerned with the
destruction and elimination of these evils.

Russell equally advocates Socialism^ as the ^panacea of all
our economic and political maladies. His ideas about sodialisxn
are not very clear, but we can derive some of Ijkis ideas about
socialism by reading the essay **The world as it could be made.”
He is against communism with its plan and programme of
wholesale change in society.

The style and manner of expression in RusselTs essays
evoke our applause. This is a prose extraordinarily logical and
effortless, marked by constant flashes of wic and iqsight. It is at
the same time characterised by **an almost native simplicity*
crystal clarity, a calm Olympian irony and a gift for jcompl^s^^
epigrammatic statement.” He has the gift of sumfiitif up a very

( 445 )

complex situation'in a few, clear and simple words and sentences.
Mr. Dilip Kumar *R6y* expressed great appreciation ior RusseU's
power in expressing his thought economically with, restraint.
Russell learnt this art with great effort, and he told Mr. Roy in
his talks with him that when he was a boy he used to **toy with
different ideas to see in how few words I could express them/'
But with his terseness, there is no dryness as we notice in Bacon’s
writings. He gives a touch of sprightliness and gaiety to his
treatment of even abstruse subjects. His early essays have a
lyrical grace, which we do not find in his later works.

Q. 102. Write a note on the Literary Critics of the 20th
Centary and their works.

Ans. Twentieth century is rich in literary criticism. There
are many celebrated and reputed critics of our times and some of
them at least such as T. S. Eliot, George Saintsbucy, Walter
Raleigh, Oliver Elton, Courthope will be recognised by posterity
as the most remarkable figures of twentieth century criticism.
none has the stature of a Dryden oc a Jonson, a Lamb or a Hazlitt,
several have done invaluable work for their contemporaries by
advancing the understanding and appreciation of literature.’***
The following are the main literary critics of our age :

Arthur Syikions.

Symons, the poet, is a literary critic of repute and his
^tudies in the poetry of Blake and Dante Gabriel Rossetti have
done much .to popularise the works of these two poets. Symons’s
The Romantic Movement in English Poetry (1910) is a valuable
contnbution to the understanding of the Romantic poets. His
other famous bboks of criticism are Baudelair (1920), Hardy
(1927) and Walter Pater (1932). Symons popularised the
French symbolist movement in English poetry by his famous
work Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899).

' Arthur Symons is an impressionistic critic. His works of
criticism seem CO be prose poems. T. S. Eliot considers him to
be an imperfect critic. Symons continues the tradition of Walter

* Dilip K. Roy : Among the Great.

** Da* A. S. (Filins : English Literature of the Twentieth Century.

( 446 )

Patet. He is Qot a verv'scientific critic yet he baa care capacity
of losing himself in a work of art He is also remackahle for bi^
extremely poetical style. His remarks about Shelley are , better
wortb- reading than some of Shelley’s own poems* His criticism
has all the defects of impress ioftistic criticism* But it has its owr^
virtues; it is most interesting to read and it is more creative thack
critical*

A. C. Bradley (1851—1935).

Bradley will be known to posterity for his famous Shakesperean
Ttagedy (1904) and Oxford Lectures on Poetry (1909). In
Shakespearean Tragedy he makes a scholarly and critical survey ot
the principal tragedies of Shakespeare^ and in the Oxford LecturcA
on Poetry he gives us his views on poetry and much illuminating
information on poets like Robert Bridges. Bradley is an authority
on Shakespeare’s tragedies and if Shakespeare was reborn, he would
need the help of Bradley to understand his former works.

Dr* F* R« Leavis seems to criticise Dr. Bradley without much
lustification. Leavis has started almost a reaction against Dr.
Bradley* The main objection of modern critics against him is
chat he does not precede with induction. Prof. Humphry House
objects to his method of determining the character of a Shakes-
pearean hero. Following the foot steps. Prof. L. C. Knight also
seems to be reacting against the Bradley tradition. But it will
have to be said that Dr. Bradiey has bis own charms and it would
be difficult to surpass him in his Shakespearean criticism.

Sir Waller Raleigh (1861—1922).

Raleigh will be remembered by bis English Novel (1898)
Milton (1900), Wordsworth (1903), Shakespeare (1907) and Six
Essays on Johnson (1910). Raleigh is a master of his subject and
his manner of presentation is extremely lucid and clear. Raleigh
continues the eclectic criticism of the Victorian Age. He has
aothtog of the chaems of modern criticism and he is essentially a
traditionalist. But he has none of the defects of modern criticism.
He has no theory to propound; be does not belong to
any groups does not write any patticulax type of criticism;
he ia not technical* His cthicism is not analytical like ihat
of T* S. $liot or P. R* Leavis. He expresses his
tfon aodvcUriiy. ^ ^

( 447 )

W P. Ker(1855-J923).

Kcf will go down in hittoxy as a scholarly critic. Hn
tamous works? axe Epic and Romance (1897), The Dark Agey
(1904). Essays on Medieval Literature (1905), The Art of P etry
(1923) and Form and Style in Poetry (1928).

Geor^^e Saiotsbury (1845—1933).

Saintsbur^ is a great name in the world ol literary criticism
He was a great scholar and a man of im nense learning. He had
two passions in life — love foe wine and love for literature.
His monumental works are Elizabethan Literature (1887), History
of English Prose (1906 — 10), History of English Criticism (1911),
History of European Criticism (1912), The Peace of the Agustans
(1916), History of English Prose Rhythm And English Novel

Prof. Saintsbury is not a scientific critic. His criticism is
remarkable for its rare charm of scholarship and style. Dr. D.
Daiches compares him with Mr. T. S. Eliot and says that
Saintshary concentrates on personal responses whereas Mr. Bliot
concentrates on the text itself. Dr. Diaches says, we sat
l)e$idys Saintsbury’s discussion of prior one of T. S. Eliot's

earlier critical essays We are struck at once with the complete

difFerence in temper. Eliot is not concerned to talk with wit
and urbanity about literary achievement on which bis readers
ace largely in agreement... Eliot’s object is to explore the literary
work in order to show what goes on in it."

The most remarkable thing about Prof. Saintsbury is his
confidence in his readers, a quality which Mr. Eliot does not
possess. Prof. Saintsbury was a very great scholar and he knew
almost all the European languages. His love of learning had
a match only in his love of drinking. He read immensely and be
had prolific memory. He read so much that words and senteo-
CCS from other authors came up to his mind unconsciously. It has
humorously been said that Prof. Saintsbury 's prose style is like
a fine pudding in which the material used is not bis own. He
was a man of very strong tastes and he could speak ▼ery
authentically about thiogs without injuring the sensibilities of bis
readers.-' '

Ciiticisih^ Arnold, he says

**With bridks of ignotance and mortar of assumption yon

( 448 )

cannot build a''critical house.**

Similarly when he praised an author, he pitaised him in the
most forceful language. This is what he says of Shelley, **The
worst utterance of Shelley is better worth-re iding than the best
panegyric of his commentators.**

Certain attempts have been made in the recent times to
associate Prof. Saintsbury with the art for art's sake movement.
It is true that in the sphere of criticism, he fails nearer to Pater
than to Arnold. But he has something of his own which can not
be explained by a common place people.

G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936).

Chesterton is known by his Brownings The Victorian Age
in Literature^ Dickens and Chaucer. Often diffuse, he can be
pointed and penetrating when he writes with force and fervour.

He is not at all a scientific critic and he is too subjective to
be accurate. His Dickens is Chestertonian Dickens. Yet he is
interesting to read he is never dull and you cannot but enjoy
all that which he has to say.

Sir Arthur Quiiler Couch (1863—1944)

Quiller Couch, Porfessor of English Literature at
Cambridge in 1912 is a critic of distinction. He published many
volumes of stimulating literary apprecition and criticism which
were originally given in the form of lectures. His main works are
Studies in Literature (Three Scries 1918, 1922, 1929), Shakespeare's
Workmanship (1918), Or the Art of Reading (1920. “His pages
talk to the reader just as their author spoke to his audiences,
arousing interest in and liking for his subject by the genial
humanity of his treatment and the free use of illustrative question,
humanistic, insisting on the intimate connection between literature
and life between books and their authors.'*

Sir Edmund Gosse (1848—1928).

Gosse's main works in criticism arc From Shakespeare to Pope
(1885)> and A History of Eighteenth Century Literature (1889). His
observation are sound and substantial.

J[. Middleton Murry (1989—)

Murry is a romantic critic and represents the ^best contjcmr
porary example of the ditbyrambic tendency in romantic crid^am.
He identifies himself with the subject of his criticism, ahd yiews

( 449 )

the wocn fx3tn the view poiat of its cteatot. He is at his best in
his famous work Keats and Shakespeare (1925). His study
of D. H. Lawrence is well brought out in Son of Woman
(1931).

i scheverell Sitwell (1897 — )

He is an impressionistic critic. His impression “is more
informed and less idiosyncratic thin that of Murry.” He spent
much energy in studying baroque and neoclassical art. For this
enterprise he had “a distinguished sensibility and sympathy and
a style that is as responsible to the bush exuberance of the
baroque as to the correctness and restraint of the classical.” His
main work is Southern Baroque Art (1924).

Lascelles Abercrombie woo reputation by his The Idea of
Great Poetry (1925), Romanticism (1926), Thomas Hardy.
Oliver Elton is well known by his English Muse (1933) and his
massive but readable work Survey of English Literature Jrom 1730
to 1880 in six volumes. Sir Herbert Grierson Is famous for his
Cross Currents in the Literature of the Seventeenth Century, Milton
and Wordsworth and Metaphysical Poetry. R. W. Chambers
produced his monumental work Man's Unconquerable Mind
(1942) in which he presents master minds from Shakespeare
to A. E. Housmao in a scholarly manner. This book is the
fruit of years of loving scholarship. E. K. Chamber's Shakespeare:
A Survey (1925), The Medieval Stage (1903) and The Elizabethan
Stage (1923) are well known works of which the first on
Shakespeare is noted for its scholarship and authoritative hand-
ling of the plays. The interest in Shakespearean criticism continued
unabated and many critics came forward with their masterly
studies of Shakespeare's plays. The chief among the Shakespearean
cm ics ate G. B. Harrison (1894) whose biographical and critical
account of Shakespeare is commendable, John Palmer (1885 —
1944) whose criticism of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson is sound,
V il.stm Kbrght (1897—) who produced the Wheel of Fire and
studied Shakespeare’s tragedies; H. B. Charlton (1890—) whose
atudy of Shakespeare’s Comedies is an admirable work. To
these works should be added the:, critical writings of Professor
Covir Wilson who is noted for :bis The Essential Shakespeare
(1932) What Happens in Hamlet (1935) and Moulton who is

( 450 )

kno^x^n by his Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist-

Tiilyard’s study of Milton op^ns a new chapter in Miltonic
criticism. Sir Maurice Bowra appealed to the literary public by
The Heritage of Symbolism (1943), From Virgil to Milton (1945)
and The Creative Experiment (1949), Basil Willey 'in his Seven^
feenth Century Background The Eighteenth Century
Background (1940) and Nineteenth Century Studies (1949),
'^traced the relationship between the currents of thought in the
ige and the creative writings of chat age, and was luminous to
scholars.’* Lord David Cecil is known by his admirable study of
Thomas Ha'dy\ and Early Victorian Novelists and Poets and Story
Tellers. C K Ogden published The Meaning of Meaning (1923),
The Principle of Literary Criticism (1924), Poetry Criticism
(1929), and Coleridge on Imagination (1930). I. A. Richards
is a great name in modern criticism and heis well
known for his Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), and
Practical Criticism^ (1929). He advocated the psychological and
analytical approach in the appreciation of a work of art. In his
hands Pegasus became a dray-horse pulling a psychological load.

was primarily concerned with analysing the elements invol-
ved in the process of comprehending a work of arc, and secondly,
with relating aesthetic value to the theory of value generally.”
4is two followers are William Kmpson and F R Leavis. William
Empson (1906— ) in Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) advanced

the analvtical criticism of Richards and his book presents, 'Si
subtle analysis of the various layers and shades of meaning which
can exist in a statement and the appreciation of which is essential
to the proper apprehension of the total statement, especially in
poetry." F. R Leavis was the editor of thi distinguished
critical journal. Scrutiny to which a number of budd
ing literary critics have made vital contribution. Leayis^s main
works are New Bearings in English Poetry (1932), Revaluation
(1947), in which he vigorously pleaded for the rehabilitation of
the. literary reputation of Marvell, Pope and Emile Bronte, The
Great Tradition (1948) in which he set out the excellence of
Geforge Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad, The Common
Pursuit (1952) which is a nice collection of the articto published
fro^ time to time in Scrutiny. - . ,

( 451 )

Dr. Leavis is a man of vciy strong tastes. He loves clarity^
t^olidity and hardness* He does not like the romantic vagueness
in criticism or creation. He is an analytical critic and docs not
believe in making sweeping generalisations. Leaving perhaps Mr.
T. S. Eliot, he is the greatest living critic He is a man who
would not yield since he is so sure of his being right. He ha^* done
as much to rehabilitate Pope and Marvell as any other critic.
The strength of his convictions can be seen in his evaluation of
Milton and Shelley. He criticises both these poets severelv. You
may disagree with Dr. Leavis but you cannot possibly afford to
ignore him. He has done to literacy criticism what Mr. Eliot has
done to English poetry. Dr. Leavis wants matter of fact, precise
and concrete criticism. He does not love mere jugglery of words.
The criticism that indulges in such devices is likely to receive a
severe blow from him. He considers Mr. Eliot to be a great
critic, but be was not afraid of talcing him to task when Mr. Eliot
revised his opinion about Milton.

Among his followers may be named Prof. L. C. Knights
and Dr. Daiches. Prof. L. C. Knight« shows the same preciseness
of expression and the same hard brilliance as Dr. Leavis. But he
is not as great a critic as Dr. Leavis, nor does he have the depth
and scholarship of that frustrated Cambridge scholar. Dr. Daiches
has written quite a good number of books and in most of them he
follows the Cambridge tradition headed by Dr. Leavis. His various
publications include. An Introduction to Literature^ Robert Burns^
Milton, The Present A^e, Literary Essays, Critical Approaches to
Liter t.fure and A Critical History of English Literature. He is at
his best in Milton and at his worst perhaps in his History of
English Literature, (n Milton the analytical bent is more pro-
nounced and his statements have an air of strong conviction about
them; whereas bis History of English Literature is a collection
too many sweeping generalisations put forward in an arti6ciatly
redundant language Yet he is one of the major living critics
and should be congratulated for restoring Yents to his proper
place.

Mention should alsp be made of the Marxist critics.
*Christophef Caudwell is the most outstanding Marxist critic. His
lUmion and HeolUy U a remarkable study of English poetry from

( 452 )

the Marxian poi it nf view. His other publication are Studies in
^ Qytng Culture^ and Mote Studies in a Dying Culture* He died
at a very early age, yet his contribution is quite outstanding
Ralph Fox contributed much by writing a Marxian history of the
English Novel in his The Novel and the People.

A strange mixture of Marxism and spiritualism is to be seen
in Mr. D. S. Savage’s books. His The Absolute Principle is a
difficult book. He is almost savagian in his criticism of the
modern novelists.

Among the critics who do not belong to any school or class
or tradition, mention should be made of Mr. P. L. Lucas. Mr.
Lucas wields a beautiful and charming style and his criticism is
most interesting to read. He criticizes the ancients and the
moderns, the romantics and the classicists in the same breath. An
undcr-current of subtle and scholarly humour runs through all
his critical works. His publications include. The Decline and
Fall of the Romantic ldea\ Literature and Psychology^ Tragedy and
Ten Victorian Poets.

In the sphere of dramatic criticism. Professor Nicoll still
stands unsurpassed. He is an authority in drama and his studies
of English and European dramatic literature are most remarkable
achievements. Professor Raymond Williams, William Archer and
G. Barker are other contemporary dramatic critics.

Sir Herbert Read made a notable contribution to the
psychological approach to literature in his study of Wordsworth in
Collected Essays in Literary Criticism (1951) and The Voice oj
Feeling (1953)- Read’s role as a critic mainly lies in his attempt
^to wed the psychological to the aesthetic in criticism.’ Cecil Day
Lewis’s The Poetic Image (1947) is a nice work on poetic imagery.
Edmund Blunden’s biographical studies of Charles Lamb and his
Contemporaries The Life of Leigh Hunt and Shelley arc nice works
of art and criticism. Virginia Woolf’s The Common Reader (1925),
in two volumes, gives a new interpretation to the psychological
novel and equally well sets out to recreate the literary figures
from the fifteenth century to the twentieth century. H^r The
Death of the Moth (1944) shows her interlinking of life and litera-
tore* E* M* Forster’s Aspects of the Novel (1927) i% an
outstanding work in understanding different aspects of the novel

( 453 )

such as plot and chatactet» and their relative importance in vorkf
of fiction.

Mrs. Virginia Woolf and Mr. B. M. Forster belong to
virhat is known as the Bloomsbury Group. It is doubtful if the
Bloomsbuiy tradition still continues. Perhaps Mr. Cyrill Connolly
can be classed with them but be shows an altogether different
trends of mind in his ihe Enemies of Promise. Courfhope*s
History of English Poetry in six volumes is a monumental work in
criticism, and to this criticism of English poets and poetry
must be added Grierson and Smith’s book A Critical History of
English Poetry.

T. S. Eliot (1888—1965)

T. S. Eliot is one of the geeatest figures in the history of
literary criticism during the 20th century. His criticism of poetry,
drama, art and society is based on a coherent series of principles
evolved from time to time. *‘He has thought himself in a consis-
tent view about literature ; as a critic, he brings caretully sharpen-
ed tools to each fresh task of literary judgment.”* Eliot owed
his inspiration as a critic to the movement in American criticism
called the movement of Humanism led by Professor Irving Babbit
and Paul Blm'er More. “This move. non t, a modern variety of
neoclassicism hostile to both the romantic and the realistic move-
ments in literature called for a return to classical standards in
criticism and for the measurement for modern litcratuic on the
scale of the classics.” Inspired by the protagonists ot thii new
wave of Humanism, Eliot also modelled his critical principles and
judgments on the line of the Humanists and his critical position in
The Sacred Wood (1920) is practically the same as that of the
humanists. Eliot was also for classicism and tradition, and
stood against the tide of romantic criticism which he characterised
fragmentany, inimature and chaotic. He felt that discipline,
order sanity, form were once again to be imposed and reintrodu-
ced in the field of literary criticism. Eliot went a few steps ahead
of American humanism and advanced on fresh line of* adjudging
»nd evaluating works of art.

Eliot upheld 'tradition/ but he did not mean that tcaditton-
* R. A. Scott— Fifty Years of English Literature.

( 454 )

alfsrs should slavishly imitate the ancients and have nothing neu
of their own. Eliot simply emphasised on the writers of his age
to keep in view the past heritage of literature and litetary criticism
while composing their own works. The present should
not cut it^elf off from all considerations of the past. In
Eliot’s view —

^'The historical sense compels a man co write not merely
with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the
whole of the literature of Europe from Homer, ind within it the
whole of the literature of his own country, has a simultaneous
existence and composes a simultaneous order.”

For T. S. Eliot Literature is a continuous process in which
the past, present, and future are one whole. He expresses his faith
in. the continuity of time and literature. In Burnt Norton
he writes :

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future

And time future contained in time past.

Thus Eliot’s position as a critic is to synthesise the presenr
with the past and to co-relate the future to the present and cake t
synoptic view of whole literary production. In bis view, the
function of the critic is to co-relate literature to the whole current
of conscious creative cfToit.’ The critic has to keep in view the
past ‘tradition’ and current ^convention.’ Eliot failed to appre^
ciate Blake for he found the eighteenth century msstic poet
lacking a frame work of accepted and traditional ideas/'

T. S. Eliot can be considered as a Classicist re stating the
claims of classicism in its demand for order, poise and ifgiit reason.

In general his conception of literature was a classical one
placing a high value on tradition, on content and form.

It is one of the peculiar excellences of f. S. Eliot that bis
uafi’uork in the field of creation is governed by his principles.^
There is a conformity between what he preaches or professes and
what he actually create:^. His criticism is not divorced from his
poetic activity. In his case the critic and the creative artist are
frequeof^ly the same person. We can better appreciate hfs early

( 455 )

poetry by studying his remarks in The Metaphysical Poets.

T. S. Eliot is at his best when he is writing on Drydcn,
Dante, Metaphysical poets, Post-Bliaabethan dramitists. His sym
pathies are with Dryden and Donne. His appreciation oi
glake and Shelley is at best reluctant and partial. Ot the
moderns, his criticism is less impressive, in After Strange Gods
(1934) he is very severe on James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence,
Virginia Woolf and Catherine Mansfield. *^His spiritual position
compelled them to denounce them as heretics/'

Eliot co-related social and literary criticism, [n this respect,
he resembles Matthew Arnold who was a critic both of life and
letters. He is of the view that arts are the by-products of society,*
and *^that good prose cannot be written by a people w ithout
convictions.^’

His critical style resembles chat of Vlatthew Arnold
particularly in the use of analysis, definition and comparison.
There is, however, a note of difference between Eliot and Arnold
While Eliot wields Arnold's tone of authority he does not suffer
from the repetitions and mannered approach of Arnold.

The err ical writings of T. S. Eliot are to be found in. The
Sacred Wovd^ (1920), Selected Essoys (1932), The Use of Poetry
and the Use of Critichni {1933) and Affer Strange Gods (1934).
His two other important works arc Vhe Idea of a Christian
Soc iety (1939) and Notes on the Dtfimiion of a Culture (1948).

Q. 103. Write an Essay on the modern Short Story and
Short Story writers.

Ans. The popularity of the short story in our times can be
;j;auged by the publication of a number of short stories in books
ind magaaines. Many authors have taken to short-story
writing,

H. G. Wells defined the short story as «any piece of prose
fiction that can be read in more than twenty minutes.” Sedgewick
^ud that a short story is like a horse race in Which the beginning
and the end count the most But it will be seen that none of

* He charged Milton with bringing about ^dissociation of
sensibility’^ which weakened Bn^iifa poetry in times to come.

( 456 ;

these defiaitions ate adequate. H.G. Weirs deHnition applies
to scores of short stories but it fails miserably when applied to,
say, Tolstoy's Family Happiness^ For Sedgewick, the editor, it
is the beginning and the end only that count. They cancel each
other out. Sir Walpole’s demand that a short stort must be full
of action is a perfect answer to those who like whisky, but if fails
on application to the short stories of Turgenev or James.
Mr. Bates suggests that a short story is what its author decides
it to be.

The history of the short story is both very long and very
short. From one point of view the story of Cain and Abel in the
Genesis is a short story. From another point of view the story
has no history prior to the nineteenth century. The short story,
in fact, as we know it today, cannot be said to have begun with
Gogol and Edgar Allen Poe. Among the other important nine-
cen^ry short story writers, we may^ name Maupassant for
)Ffah^,,!!]^j^genev and Chekhov for Russia, O’ Henry for America.
No figure stands out from the nineteenth century English scene
in the sphece of short story writing. The reason is not far to
seek. Suggestion and subtleness are the most important and
e^sential ingredients of a short story; whereas the nineteenth
century English prose fiction is marked by a heavy style and a
tendency io moralize everything. It was under such circumstances
that the short story could not flourish in the nineteenth century
England. It was only with the advent of 1880's that the short
story proper came to be recognised and practised in England.
The names that now stand out are those of
R L. Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling and Oscar Wilde. R. L.
Stevenson is remarkable for his flne poetic moralism, and
Oscar Wilde for his brilliant paradoxical style.

Kipling was primarily a journalist and he succeeded very
well in this sphere since the short story demands speed and
action above all. The belief that he was a great writer is a myth.
But he did quite a lot to make the short r story in , England move
faster t^n ever. His Puck af Pookas Hill was published ll|« 4908.
He, with. H. G. Wells, remains the connecting link bet^eit^ the
sborfstory writers of the nineteenth and the present century.

. jfj *pr Wells wrote scientific stories. The greatest achieve-

( «7 )

«icnt of Wells lies in the fact that he makes his ceadeis believe
ill that he has to say. He is a comaocei talking in the language
of scientific powee snd reform. His genius can be defined as a
flombioation of Dickens and Poe. It has been said that he lacks
iicistic finish, and the objection seems to be true.

The most outstanding work in this field was done by A. E.
Coppard and Katherine Mansfield. They brought poetry to the
English short story for the first time and their reputation rests
mainly on their short stories. The snort stories of 4. E. Coppard have
the flavour of poetry. His short stories are remarkable for theii
poetic realism. He became well known with his collection oi
icories called Adam and Eve and Pinch-ole. Coppard had a theory
that a short story is something meant to be told; and he is a
cemarkable teller of tales. He had a strong sense of the comic and
the tragic as can be seen in his stories like The Higgler and The
Black Dog. He published numerous volumes of short stories
The Black (1923), The Field Mustard (1926) and Dunky Fillow
(L933) etc. Later on under the influence of Joyce, he became
obsessed with his own voice and his art declined.

Katherine Mansfield stands apart among the English short
story writers. Her reputation rests mainly on a single volume
called The Garden Party. Mansfield writes like a poet, and feels
intensely like a child. She was considerably influenced by
J. Chekhov. She picks up a moment from the life of an ordinary
man and writes about it in a very poetic language. Her short
stories reveal stream of consciousness technique in its miniature
torm. She is not a moralist and she presents only that which she
has seen herself. Her short stories have the delicacy of a rose
and the charm of a lyric about them. She presents her characters
sympathetically, but character building was never her job. She
leaves much undone and we have to enjoy as much what is left in
as what is left out. “Katherine Mansfield's human scene is not a
wide onc.”'f Her other collections are : Something Childish and
The Dovers Nest.

The success of these authors, the decline of poetry and the
dse of various magazines and periodicals, encouraged various

t A. S. Collins : 2Cth Century Liuraiurc.

( 458 )

Other biiort stor^ writers. They were further eucouraged by the
success of Galsworthy and W. Somerset Maugham. Galsarorthy's
^shoft stories ire remarkable for their sympathetic readeriog of
the characters from the lower strata of society. Galsworthy u
not a. Very great craftsman but he is remarkable for his compas-
sioo such as may be seen in stories like Quality. But» Somerset
Maugham has nothing of that compassion. He writes lik^
Maupassant, (whom he considers to be the greitest short story
writer of the world). Maugham is like a lawyer, and his short
stories are as objective as the report of a court case.

A major contribution has been made in this field by the
Irish authors. Sean O’ Flaherty did a great deal to populatize
the shore story. His The Untilled Field is a remarkable collection
of short stories. His short stories are poetic and delicate. But ht
left short story writing very soon : so much a loss to the short
story which he popularized as much as Maupassant. Among his
followers arc Mr. Sean O* Faolain and Mr. Frank O' Connor.
Pkolain has been influenced by J. Chekhov and Turgenev, and
his collection called The Midsummer Night Madness contains
stories of Irish life. Faolain derives much of hts inspiration from
the rich folk tradition of Ireland. Frank O’ Connor’s stories
afe^not as those of Faolain, but they are remarkable in their own
way. O’ Connor is more objective than Faolain and shows an
indebtedness to Maupassant.

Contemporaneous with the Irish Renaissance, we have the
Alnerican Renaissance brought about by Shernwood Anderson* The
American short story sank down after Strephen Crane. It was
reduced to a mechanical formula, Sherwood Anderson revived it
afresh and taught the Americau writers to come into a closes
contact with the life of their own people.

Anderson’s Winshury Ohio is a remarkable achievement
and it contains short stories that have a rare charm about them.
Sherwood Anderson exercised almost an immediate influence.
Earnest Hemingway came out with bis In Our Time which is a
collection of beautiful short stories. Hemingway cuts out a whole
forest of virtuoufity and makes the short story shorter still* . The
world of his short stories is a world of crime, lust« duds, p^ssioas
and darkness. lut he succeeds in depicting that wdldd,

( 159 )

Coming back to England, we have D. H. Lawrence, Joseph
Coflia<i and E. M. Forster. Joseph Conrad’s short stories are
temarkable for their fine, soft poetic realism and a certain sense of
mystery. They arc essentially the short stories of a romantic
author. E. M. Forster’s collection of six short stories, The
Gelesticil Omnibus (1911) is another individual experiment.

More remarkable than both cf them is D. H Lawrrnce
who published his The t^russian Officer in 1914. Lawrence was
too much of an individualist. He eschewed technical limitation^
He was bent upon breaking the rules when be wrote Novels. But
he could, fortunately, control his insensible technique while
writing short stories. His Modern Lover and Love Among the Hay*
stacks arc remarkable pieces. He is sensuous, poetic and chaiming.
His stories smell of earth and the smell is a delightful one.

Now, we have various short story writers. It would be
difficult to even mention all of them.

H. E. Bates is, however, the most outstanding name from the
contemporary scene. By 1934, he had published two volumes, Day's
England, The Black Boxer. He shows less originality and strength
than A. E. Coppard. He is remarkable for his harmoniously poetic
style. His stories have humour, no doubt ; but it stops short of the
truly comic But as suggested by Dr. Collins even if there was
nothing else, **his pictures of the novels and fields, farms and
roads, would still show his mastery of setting : it is lively and
loving in its details.”

As has been said, many writers deserve to be named along-
side Bates, but it must suffice to add the names of Henry
Williamson for his achievement in this field with his stories of
birds and beasts, T. F. Powys with his stories of the country side
and Rhys Davies with his short stories of the Irish fishing coast.
The name of Miss Elizabeth Bowen, however, dcscrvci a special
mention since she has popularized the short story, through
ber various illuminztiog articles on the art of short story. She
Scneially writes about the lives of artists and painters,
and her portraits arc remarkable for theif poetic reaHsm.

Mention must also be made of the Indian Short Story
writers writing in fiaglish. Since the death of the Kipling-myth,

( 460 )

Indian wcitefs have come forward with the realistic pictures of the
life of their own pepole. Dr. Muik Raj Anand*8 short stories ate
cemarkable for their sympathetic treatment of the underdogs. R.k.
Narayan shows a rare-craftsmanship. The name of Bhabhani
Bhattacharya and K. A. Abbas should also be mentioned. Among
the younger writers, the name of Ruksin Bond deserves mention.
We have no space to deal with them in detail, and so we must past
silently by.

Literary history is a warning against prophecies. Yet wt
can safely assert that the future of the short story is immense,
without going to the extent of saying that it will oust the novel.
But it is a fact that it has compelled the novel to its size. Th#
numerous magazines and the rise of the film industry have gone •
long way to help the short story flourish amazingly^

Twentieth Centurj^ Drama

Q. 104. What were the factors responsible for the emergenet
of drama as a powerful literary force during the twentieth
century ?

Alls. The dawn of the twentieth century witnessed the
emergence of drama, which had been neglected by the Victorian
poets and dramatists, as a powerful literary force. All the condi-
tions operating against the blossoming of Drama during the
Victorian age were gradually removed, and more and more
interest was taken by actors, playgoers, and theatre managers
in popularising drama and making it a ijtcc to reckon with in the
tield of literature. As time passed, new trends were introduced
in drama and every effort was made by dramatists to make drama
life-like, realistic, and appealing to the common man. The moral
taboos imposed on drama by the priggish Victorians were also
removed and dramatists were at ease in producing once again
comedies of manners, which had enjoyed their heyday during the
Restoration period. The vogue for comedies was once again
introduced in the wake of the social changes and democratic
freedom that came with the new century. The new social problems
rising in ihe new set up of values cried for solution, and drama
seemed to be a fitting medium in which justice could be done in
solving the social and economic problems of the times. The
anodern dramatist took his task seriously and gave a new outlook
to drama, which it had not seen in the Victorian age.

Recounting the emergence of drama as a powerful force in
onr times J. W. Marriot writes in The Ji^odern Drama — *‘It is
possible to account for the mi cade that happened ? There is no
single explanation, but we can discern a dozen or more contribu-
tory factors all of which seem significant. There has been •
gradual disappearance of the ancient prejudice against theatre
going, a welcome relaxation of the ceosoeship, a steady rise in
standards ot judgment, due to the spread of education, an incceae-

( 462 )

lag matgia of leisar^ ia the life of the ordinary "maa and woman,
a deepening conviction' that a certain amount of recreation i$ the
natural right of every human being, and the remarkable compe-
tence in the theatre for amusement. We have to recognise the
influence of the hew producer with his theories of drama as a
composite art — a synthesis of all arts. The arrival of the new
scenic artist and the stage, electrician has revolutionised produc
tion. But the gteatest factor of all is undoubtedly the change
in the dramatist himself. The modern dramatist takes the drama
sei^ously. His purpose is the interpretation of life and playwriting
has become an art as well as a craft.’**

Q. 105. Write a short essay on the main characteristics
and features of twentieth century drama.

Ans. Drama, which had sufTeted a steep decline during the
Victorian Age was revived with great gusto in the beginning of
the twentieth century, and the course of six decades has witnessed
many trends and currents in the twentieth century drama.

Realism. *

Realism is the most significant and outstanding quality of
modern drama. The dramatists of early years of the twentieth
century were interested in naturalism and realism and it was
theic endeavour to deal with real problems of life in a realistic
technique in theic plays. **The post-war generation of men acd
women started the demand for reality above all things. They
demanded that dramatists should show them 'life,’ as if living
itself were not sufficiently intense for them. The theatre was not
an escape for them.”**

It was Henrik Ibsen, the Norwegian dramatist, who
popularised realism in modern drama. He dealt with the problems
nf real life in a realistic manner in his plays. His example was
^•Uowed by .Robertson, Jones, Pinero, Galsworthy and Bernard
Shaw in their plays. In the dramas of these realists we get gUmpses
of real life, with all its watts and sordid ugliness. They deal wRb
problems of marriage, justice, law^ administration and strife

!* J. W. Marriott— The Modern Drama.

ff §ir Cjedric Hardwicltlc— The Drama. Tomorrow^

( 463 )

betweoii capital ttid labour and use the theatre as a means for
bringing about reforms in the conditions of society prevailing iif
their days.

Modern drama has developed the Problem Play\ and thers
arc many modern dramatists who have written a number of
Problem Plays in our times. Shaw» Birker, Galsworthy arc the
writers who have given a spurt to problem plays. In their hands
the “problem plays became a powerful and effective medium of
social criticism, and generally vindicated the right oi the indivi*
dual to shape his life and destiny, unfettered by the prejudices and
conventionsr of society. It dramatised the conflict of ideas and
social attitudes and upheld the principles of equality, freedom
and justice. The problem play was a new experiment in form and
technique, and dispensed with the conventional devices and
expedients of the theatre.”*

Play of Ideas.

Modern drama is essentially a drama of ideas rather than
action. The stage is employed by dramatists to give expression to
certain ideas which they seek to propagate in society. The modern
drama dealing with the problems of life has become far rnofe
intellectual than ever it was in the history of drama before tfi«
present age. “With the treatment of actual life the drama becarlic
more and more a drama of ideas, sometimes veiled in the main
action, sometimes didactically set forth.*'**

Romanticism.

The earlier dramatists of the twentieth century were
Realists to the core, but the passage of time brought in new trends
in modern drama. Romanticism, which had been very dear to
Elizabethan dramatists found its way in modern drami, and it
was mainlv due to Sit J. M. Barrie’s effort that the new wave of
coinanticifm swept over modern drama for some years of the
twentieth centuty. Barrie kept aloof from sordid and squalid
tealities of life and made excursions into the world of romance
iantasy, ohagic and super-naturalism in such plays as Mary Rose^
Peter Pan^ A Kiss /or Cindertlia^ Admirable Crichton and Dear
Brutus^ He charmed his readers by the tender whimsicality of

* Dr. R. C. Gupta— The Problem Play.

A. Nicoll^British Drama.

( 464 )

ld$ Imagioatipo: and ptovided them an escape (tom the dxab and
doll tealities ot life.

Poetic Plays.

Anothet teaction to cealism and natutallsm in dtama wa»
erinced in the popalatisation of poetic plays by a host of dxama-
tists who bare produced poetic plays in laige numbexs. T. S.
Bliot espoused the cause of poetic plays against the realistic
pxose dxama of the modern age. He stated, **[ believe that
poetxy is the natural and complete medium for dtama and the
verse play is capable of something much more intense and
oKciting.”

Among those who gave an impetus to poetic drama in out
times the names of Stephen Phillips, J. B. Flecker, John
Otinkwater, John Masefield, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Fliot, and
Christopher Fry ate worthy of special mention. They have made
poetic plays a force to reckon with in modern dtama.

Historical and Biographical Plays.

Another trend perceptible in modern dtama is in the di>
KCtion of using history and biography for dramatic treatment.
These axe many beautiful historical and biographical plays in
modern dramatic literature. Shaw’s Ceaser and Cleopatra and
St. Joan are historical plays of great importance. Ervine wrote
The Lady of Belmont and popularised the old historical ebaxa-
etexs in Shakespeare’s play*. John Drinkwatex penned four
histoxical plays : Abraham Lincoln (1918) Mary Stuart (1921 — 22)
Oliver Cromwell (1922) and Robert Lee (1923). In each one of
these plays there is a central dominating personality standing
on a higher pedestal over the multiplicity of individually deli-
neated characters. Clifford Bax wtote several historical plays,
the chief of them being Mr. Pepys (1926) Socrates (1930), The
Venetian (1936). Bax’s effective treatment of chacactex
his skilful wielding of material, and his delicate sense of style
give pxime distinction to his woxk.”*

Biography has been dexterously used 'in two pxominmit
plays of out times. Barrets of Wimpole Stre& by Rudolf Besiex
and The Lady with a Lamp by Reginald Berkley. In the iormex

* A. Nicoll : Bxitish Dtama.

( 465 ;

play biographical details about Robert Browning and Mr.
Elizabeth Barret Browning form the texture of the play, while
the latter play deals with the life and achievements of Florence
Nightingale.

The Irish Movement

A new trend in modern drama was introduced by the Irish
dramatists who brought about the Celtic Revival in literature.

In the hands of the Irish dramatists like W. B Yeats, J. M.
Synge, Lcaoox Robinson. T. C. Murray, and Edward Martyn,
drama ceased to be realistic in character, and became an expre-
>sion of the hopes and aspirations of the Irish people from
remote days to their own rinses. The imaginative idealism which
has always characterised the Celtic races, the love of passionate
tnd dreamy poetry which has exercised a fascinititm over the
Irish mind, the belief in the fairy world which has been an article
of faith in the Irish people have been represented in modern
Irish drama. The object of the above stated Irish dramatists

was, ‘"not to make people think but to make them feci; to give

them an c notional and spiritual uplifting such as they might
experience at Mass in a Cathedral or at the performance of a
sympathy.”

Impressionism.

Impressionism constitutes another important feature of
modern drama. In the impressionistic plays of W. B. Yeats, the
main effort is in the direction of recreating the experience of the
artist and his impressions about reality, rather than in
presenting reality as it is. Impressionistic drama of the modern
age seeks to suggest the impressions on the artist rather than
make an explicit statement about the objective characteristics of
things or events.

Expressionism*

Expressionism is another important feature of modern
drama. It marks an extreme reaction against naturalism. The
movement which had started early in Germany made its way in
English drama, and several modern dramatists like Sean O Casey,
C. K. Mtinro, H. F. Rubinstein, J. B. Priestley, Elmer Rice and
Eugene O Neill have made experiments in the expressionistic
tendency in modern drama. ‘♦Expressionist drama was concerned

( 466 )

not with society but with man. It aimed to offex subjective,
psychological analysis not so much of an individual as of a type,
and it made much of the subconscious. Puc such a study,
established dramatic forms and methods of expression were in-
adequate^ and the expressionists threw overboard conventional
structure in favour of an unrestricted freedom. Their dialogue
was often cryptic and patterned, now verse, now prose, and was
in every way as far removed from the naturalistic prose of the
realist school as can well be imagined.”^

Comedy of Manners.

There is a revival of the comedy of manners in modern
dracnatjc literature. Oscar Wilde, Noel Coward, and Somerset
Maugham have done much to revive the comedy of wit in our
days. The drama after the second world war has not exhibited
a love for comedy, and the social conditions of the period after
the war are not very favourable for the blossoming of the artifi-
cial comedy of the Restoration age. 'The Comedy of Manners
is a tender plant and will not bloom if cold winds are blowing.’’*^*
Stage Directions.

In modern drama there Ire elaborate stage directions.
These stage directions considerably ease the work of dramatic
production on the stage. One comes across elaborate stage
directions in the plays of Galsworthy and Bernard Shaw
Technique.

In modern drama the three classical unities of time, place
and action are generally maintained. Dialogues in modern drama
are short and trenchant. The lack of action is made up by fine
dialogues. Further, 'Soliloques’ and .‘Asides* have been comple-
tely avoided in modern drama.

Conclusion.

Whatever confusion there may be, however, « and whatevci
failure may occur, it is certain that the Renaissance of Eoglisk
drama heralded in the nineties of the last century has not lost its
vital force, and modern drama is a tremendous literary fo^tce is
twentieth century literature.

B. Albert : A History of English Literature*

A. Nicoll : British Drama:

( 467 )

Q. I®6. Give joor estimate of Henry Arthur Jones (1851—1929)
and A. W. Pinero (1855 — 1934) as pioneers of the new drama in the
twentieth century.

Ana. Henry Arthur Jones and A. W. Pinero were the
pioneers in the 6cld of twentieth century drama, and they carried
forward the heritage of Robertson in their dramatic works.

The plays of Henry Arthur Jonci can be divided into
three periods. His earlist efforts were in the direction of pro-
ducing sentimental and melodramatic plays. The Silver Kini>
(1882) is a landmark among his melodramatic plays. «His early
melodramas were excellent, relying as they did on steadily inten-
sifying emotion rather than on stage carpentry, and moving
always to a climax that satisfied the ethical.**^

The second period began with Saints and Sinners (1884).
Streaks of melodrama are combined with flashes of satire. This
play is a prelude to many other social plays such as The Crusades^
The Hypocrites^ and the Breaking of a Butterfly. In these plays
Jones endeavoured to present in a sincere way the problems oj
middle class life. Though here and there, there are melodramatii
extravagances and a predilection for the picture poster situation
yet the general impression left on our minds after reading thcs<
plays is that of realism. His plays portray the progressiv
individuals standing against the effete con ventioas of an outmodet
and tyrannical society. Jones does not sympathise with the rebel
like Susan Harabin, but he gives a good exposition to their poir
of view.

The third and the best period of Jone's dramatic art wf
devoted to the composition of comedies marked with satire an
jollity. The Liars (1897) is a delightful comedy modelled on tl
style of the Comedy of Manners.

Jones was popularising social comedies, but the presence
melodramatic scenes militated against their social appeal. J
lacked breatli of outlook and depth of thought, and was oft
led away by sentiment and melodramatic fiashes. But inspite
these drawbacks he paved the way for social comedy and probli
play.

* J. W. Marriott : Modern Drama.

( 468 )

Jones was a skilled craftsman with a real sense of the theatre
and the ability to create effective scenes. But in every branch
of drama he attempted^ he failed to achieve signal success.
“Jones’s true value is as an innovator who pointed the way for
others greater than himself.'’

Arthur Wing Pinero.

A. W. Pinero was the son of a lawyer and was intended for
his father’s profession, but he chose the dramatic field in prefe-
rence to the wrangles of the law court. Like Jones,
Pinero began with trivial comedies and faeces, but later on
drifted to the production of serious social plays. Pinero’s first
notable production The Money Spinner was followed by other
comedies and social satires such as The Magistrate (1885), The
School Mistress (1886). Dandy Dick (1887), Sweet Lavender
(1888), The Hrincess and the Butterfly (1889), and the Weaker Sex
(1889). These early attempts of Pinero are satirical In tone and
reformative in appeal.

Pinero’s real genius as a dramatist is unfolded in bis
The Profligate^ The Second Mrs* Tanqueray^ The Thunderbolt^ and
The Notorious Mrs* Ebb Smith* These plays are serious in tone
and tragic in theme. They represent life in realistic colours. The
much talked play Second Mrs. Tanqueray is an exceptionally
vulgar and hideous piece of work. It deals with the mcchinations
of a sinful woman to undo her respectable husband. It is desti-
tute of healthy sentiment. Pinero was criticised by St. John
Ervine for vulgarity, but the dramatist did not bother for the
criticism; for the problem plays produced at this time were
usually repugnant to good taste.

^ Pinero was a pioneer in the field of introducing realhm and
satire in drama. His realism was tempered by conventional
melodramatic intrusions, mawkish sentimentalism and footlight
expedients. Still the main accent in his works i.- on the prejudices
and the errors of the upper middle class society of his age.

“Pinero had an effective sense of stage situation, his plays
are well written and his characters are more life like than
characters in English drama had been for generations before he
began to write, though by the time of his death in 1934 cpioat of
his plays appeared naive and artificial to a generation that was

( 469 )

more sophisticated and better informed about life and its
problems,’**

Assessment of Jones and Pinero.

“In the hands of Pinero and Jones the drama was coming
closer to real life. But they were both too clever and too sensitive
to popular taste to advance too quickly. They knew that actor-
manager is still wanted 'for' acting parts. They knew that the
theatre-going public still wanted an absorbing story. And so they
were careful to provide theatrical excitement of all good old kind.
They still sacrificed consistency of characterisation to the exigen-
cies of the plot. The catastrophe was brought about too often by
co-i^cidence : they still faked circumstances for theatrical
effect. Their realism was only superficiaL The actions of the plays
were always possible and credible, but sometimes questionably
probable and seldom invit ible.”**

“Neither Jones nor Pinero were more than skilful
practioners who grew impatient with the mechanical patterns of
drama as they found it and tried to provide novelty and depth by
discussing problems of contemporary morality. They had neither
the wit of Oscal Wilde nor of Shaw nor did they have the literary
imagination*’ or the depth of moral and psychological undecstand-
ing to be able to present a social problem as a typical one.”t

“In defence of Jones and Pinero it can be said that what-
ever failings they might have as pioneers in the held of realistic
drama, they were masters of their craft and important figures in
the dramatic revival of our times.

Q 107. Give a brief account of the main dramatic works
of John Galsworthy (1867—1933).

Ans.' John Galsworthy was one of the greatest literary
hgurcs of the 20th. century. He was a novelist, an essayist, a short
story writer, a critic and a dramatist of repute. His main
dramatic works are the following

* A. C. Ward : Twentieth Century Literature
** Lynton Hudson : The Twentieth Century Drama,
t David Daiches : A Critical History of English Literature,
Volume II.

< 470 )

The Sliver Box* «

This book , presents a criticism of the law prevaiUog in
England during his times. It deals with the old ethkism of British
Law so pointedly referred to by Goldsmith in his Traveller that
there is one law for the rich and another for the poor* Galsworthy
tries to show in the Silver Box that law can be purchased by the
power of wealth and he seems to re echo the lines of Goldsmith
in the Traveller : —

Laws grind the poor^

The rich men rule the Law.

Jack Barthwick, the son of a rich M. P. commits the
same crime of stealing as Jones, the poor man, but Jones is puni-
shed whereas Jack is allowed to go scot free. **Both father and
son lealiae perfectly that Jones is being badly treated, that he and
Jack should in a just society, have received the same punish'
ment, but circumstances will it otherwise. The one is a rich
man’s son; the other is a nobody. Society, that invisible
presence, determines that the rich shall be preferred to the
poor.” (Nicoll).

I'he Strife.

^ Galsworthy’s Strife is a beautiful indictment of the
present structure of industrial society. It presents the
strife between capital and labour, and advocates better

understanding between these two great forces of oui

industrial life. The leader of the capitalist is Antony and the
leader of the labourers is Roberts. Galsworthy points out that
in the interest of industrial harmonoy both capitalists and labo-
urers should work in unison and should not unnecessarily Bght for
their rights. There should be reconciliation between the two parties
since unnecessary strikes and lock-outs hamper the progress of
^ industrial life and retard production.

The Show.

In this play, Galsworthy records his opposition to the press
and to the general behaviour of journalists who make scandal of
the public life of people by unnecessarily bringing their private
affairs into the public eye. This play is a great attack upon the
press which Galsworthy has so strongly criticised in hfr^ other
•ovels and dramas such as Maid in'- ff^aiting* , '

( 471 )

• In S/iOH' th; press is pillotied mercilessly and Galswicthy
pleads fof good sense for those who are manning the press today,”
Ihe Skin G»me.

The Skin Game is a criticism of the war. In this play
Cials worthy presents his indictment of the Great War in an
allegorical manner. The symbolism, which Galsworthy generally
efichewedy is presented in this, play. The situation is worked out in
such a way that frequently it runs parallel to the situation of
the War.

The Forest.

In this play, Galsworthy exposes the evils ol our capitalistic
society. It gives a picture of financiers and their unscrupulous ways
and dishonest dealings in society. Galsworthy shows in this play
that our industrial life is like a forest or a wilderness in which
capitalists prowl like lions without any restraint upon the unwary
and innocent people, ignorant of their financial tricks.

The Joy.

In Joy GaU worthy presents various forms of egoistic
prejudices, delusion and numerous other vices that eat into the
vitals of our life. Galsworthy wants to show in this play that most
of the troubles in our life rise on account of egoism, selfishness,
prejudices and lack of sy.npathy.

A Family Man.

This is a domestic drama and in this play Galsworthy attacks
the misuse of authority and exposes its harmful consequences in
domestic life. The dramatist very cleverly shows that too much
exhibition of authority on the part of the elders is bound to lead
to rebellion in the young hearts of grown up people. He suggests
that undue authority should not be exercised and elders in the
family should exercise restraint in the use of authority over tbcic
subordinates. The play is absurdly improbable and even farcical,
but it successfully derides the idea that man can treat the members
of his family like a piece of property, and so points a moral which
is brilliantly elaborated in The Forsyte Saga,

Jastice

Justice is a social tragedy and is one ot the greatest works of
Galsworthy. It is a plea for greater sympathy for the doeeltets and
waifs of society. In this plsy Galsworthy shows that a man who

( 472 )

commits some theft undet yety straiteoed circumstances like Falder
should not be subjected to the course of law» because it is out
society that is responsible for turning innocent people into sinners,
The speech of Frome in the court of law represents Galsworthy's
attitude towards the subject of justice and law courts. In short, it
is a play that deals with the problems of the criminal and the
treatment of society towards such criminals.

The Mob.

In the Moby Galsworthy presents the mentality of the mob,
its obstinacy and its unthinking mind. It is the story of an idealist
who stands against the mob and who is ultimately defeated by the
forces of the mob. In this tragedy Galsworthy shows how idealists
and visionaries are crucified at the altar of mob mentality.
Galsworthy’s great dislike for mob mentality is expressed in these
words in the drama.

“You — mob, are most contemptible thing under the

sun. You are the thing that pelts the weak; kicks women;

hurls down free speech. This is today, that to-morrow.

Brain you have none. Spirit — not the least of it.”

These words against the mob represent the spirit of this play.

A Bit of Love.

In this play Galsworthy presents the tragedy of an idealist
who is misunderstood by the world. It is the story of an idealist
whose principles of life are far higher than the understanding
of ordinary people in our society. The idealist has to suffer a
lot at the hands of the people because he is not willing to sacrifice
the high principles of his life, Galsworthy tries to show in thi$
play that any one willing to stick to high principles must be ready
to suffer opposition and persecution in his life. However, the
lesson under-lying this play is that in the ordinary course of life
idealism should not be carried too far because it does not pay to
be an extreme idealist in the world of realities.

The Eldest Sod.

The Eldest Son is a social tragedy based upon caste feeling.
The subject of this tragedy is that strong family traditions and
prestige must be maintained at all costs and should not be
sacrificed for any feelings. Conscience can be sacrificed at thd altar
of family prestige and traditions. ^

( 473 >

Loyalties.

Galsworthy’s Loyalties is a play in which the dramatist deals
with the subject of caste prejudice or caste feelings. It is a cry
against racial prejudice shown by the Christians to one Captain
Dancy, a Jew. Different kinds of loyalties are presented in this play.
The most noticeable being the loyalty to race, loyalty to friendship;
professional loyalty and lastly the loyalty to married life.
Foundations.

In FoM«rfnrio/rv, Galsworthy teaches that a religion of kind-
ness is the only remedy for removing the evils caused by caste
prejudices and caste feelings. He advocates sympathy and charity
for the suffering people and this play pleads for imaginative
sympathy for the waifs and derelicts of society. The same idea
is carried further in another play Escape^ In both these plays,
Galsworthy presents the true spirit of humanity which he regards
as the negation of caste feeling.

These arc the prominent plays of John Galsworthy and anyone,
desiring to have a thorough understanding of Galsworthy should
read R. H. Coat’s book Galsworthy As A Dramatic Artist. The plays
of Galsworthy have been discussed by Coats under the following
heads : —

(1) Plays of Family Relationships (joy— A Family Man)

(2) Social Injustice (The Silver Box; The Show, The
Forest).

(3) The Tragedy of Idealism.

(4) Plays of Class and Caste Feeling.

Q. 108. Give your estimate of John Galsworthy as a Dramatist.

Ans. John Galsworthy was one of the greatest dramatists
of the school of realism and naturalism in drama, and played a
conspicuous part in popularising the Problem Play in the twentieth
century. He was a dramatist of social life and concentrated his
attention on problems facing us in society. He found his material
and inspiration in the world of everyday life and affairs, and
described himself ‘as a painter of pictures, a maker of things, as
^incere^y as I know how, imaginated out of what I have seen and

( 474 )

felt.** Leaving aside The Little Dream^ he maintained a realistic
attitude in his dramas consistently and it was his avowed object
as a dramatist to deal with the actual facts and conditions of
contemporary life, instead of making excursions into the realms
of fancy and romance. Like the Scottish dramatist Barrie,
Galsworth) was wedded to the actual and tried to present as
faithfully as he could the phenomena of life and character without
fear, favour or prejudice. He made no attempt to glorify and
embellish the dreary realities of a dull life with the false colours
of romance, but strove to create an illusion of actual life on the
stage *^as to compel the spectator to pass through an experience
of his own, to think and make and write with people he saw think
ing, talking, and moving in front of him.**t work is rooted

in contemporary life and provides a vivid and fairly accurate
picture of the conditions society of the times in which he
lived. He'has defined art as ‘‘the perfect expression of sell in
contact with the world’*, and his dramatic art at least is based
on his. reaction to the world at large.

He is the critic and the interpreter of contemporary English
life in his dramas. In his plays we have a line discussion of the
problems of marriage, sex relationship, labour disputes, adminis-
tration of law, solitary confinement, caste feeling or class
prejudice. In Silver Box and Justice j he deals with the problem
of justice and the cruel working of the legal machinery. In Strife
he enneent rates on the conflict between capital and labour, and in
The Skin Game he brings out the conflict between the landed
gentry and the new capitalistic class. The main plays of
Galsworthy deal with social problems. These varied problems of
our social life are treated by Galsworthy in relation with the
social organism as a whole. Ibsen had also dealt with problems in
his dramas, but he treated social problems in relation to the indi-
vidual ox the family. Shaw occasionally dealt with the problems of
the individual in relation with society, but Galsworthy always
discussed problems in relation to social organism.

His Impartiality and Detachment.

Galsworthy deals with the problems of life with impartiality-

* life and Letters of J. Galsworthy Ed. by H. V. Matrat.

\ Galsworthy : ‘Some Platitudes Concerning Drama’

( 475 )

He is an artist and takes a detached vie<v of the ptoblems, though
bv probing deeply we can feel his sympathy with one side or the
other. Bat as a rule he examines both sides of the case with e^ual
carefulness and presents them without expressing any opinion, lie
Strikes the note of impartiality in the following words, “Let me try
to eliminate any bias and see the whole thing as should an umpire,
one of those pure things in white coats; purged of all the preju-
dices, passions and predilections of mankind. Let me have no
temperament for the time being. Only from an impersonal point
of view, there be such a thing am I going to get even approxim-
.itely at the truth.” While presenting the picture of contemporary
life, he keeps himself in the background. He does not allow his
own personality to intrude into his dramas. In his plays he has
always tried to present both sides of a problem with strict
impartiality. To maintain balance and poise in his dramatic tcchni-
4ue, he has not been swept off his feet by emotion. He might be
emotionally sympathetic to this character or that, to this class or
the other, but as a dramatist he successfully checks the tamptation
of treating any particular character with undue partiality

In his Silver Box Jones, an unemployed young man, steals
a silver putse in a fit of drunkenness, from Jack Barthwick, the
idle son of a wealthy Liberal M. P. We can hardly blame Jones for
this trifling crime when unemployment was prevalent everywhere
and when even Jack Barthwick himself could steal the silver purse
from an unknown lady and go unpunished by law. But a strictly
impartial judge like Galsworthy cannot allow this crime to go
unpunished, though he allows Jones to have his full say and hints
at the fact that there were two laws prevalent at that time, one
for the rich and the other for the poor, ahd Jones because he is
poor, cannot hope foe that justice which he could easily buy if
he were rich. “If Galsworthy had been made of cheaper clay he
would have made the Barthwicks unspeakable villains, and the
loneses the innocent victims. But old Barthwick is a well meaning
man, and Jones is a scoundrel and a wife-beater. There is good
and bad on both sides. The balance is made as fair as the
dramatist can make it.”* ____________

* J. W. Marriott : , Modern Drama.

( ■•76 )

In Strife also the balance is kept intact with perfect
impartiality. The dramatist presents both sides of the case. He
presents the case for Capital and Labour with strict impartiality.
In the play the scales are held dispassionately and the readers only
feel the futility of the tragic pride and prejudice on both
sides; the side of Anthony, the capitalist and Roberts, the labour
leader.

Instances can be multiplied to show Galsworthy’s impartial
approach to the problems of life. As an artist he kept his impar-
tiality admirably well, with the result that his plays seem inconclu-
sive. There is no finality about them.

Galsworthy’s Sympathy and Humanity.

Though Galsworthy presents his situations and characters
with impartiality, yet, if we go deep down in bis plays, we can
detect his sympathy for the down-trodden and the underdog in
society. His sympathy extends even to animals. He has a Tolstoyan
reverence for all life. Once the veil of this intellectual impartiality
is lifted, the humanist in Galsworthy is clearly revealed, voicing
his strongest protest against the cruelty and injustice of out
society. The warmth of feeling could hardly be chilled by the cold
touch of the necessities of dramatic art. The humanistic
approach to life, and its problems is evident in almost all the
plays of Galsworthy and the best example of it can be given fronn
Justice. Galsworthy’s sympathy is evidently with Faldcr. In the
defence of the counsel foe Falder, we feel the voice of Galsworthy
himself. It appears to us that the dramatist has put off his lawyer’s
gown and is passionately appealing to consider the case of the
accused with compassion. The judge may turn a deaf ear to the
sentimental appeal of Mr. Frome, the* lawyer for Falder, but it
will never fail to find a sympathetic echo in. the hearts of the
readers and the audience, became the voice of the dramatist is
presented through Frome. In this respect it is interesting t«>
compare Galsworthy with Bernard Shaw. Shaw has actually more
imaginative sympathy than is usually conceded to him, hut his
satiric gift, his genius for derision causes him to appear cynical
Shaw is carried away by his own views to such an extent that he
fails to enter adequately into the view point of others. Gals^^ortby
is never guilty of this lapse of dramatic sympathy and

^ ( 477 )

ing. Whcfc Shs.w would scoff and cursi, Galsworthy would wince
and ultimately find himself constrained to bless. “Shaw’s
intclkctualism runs to witty satire and attack; Galsworthy’s
emotionalism leads rather to charity and sympathy and
toleration.”

‘“Underlying the plot of each of Galsworthy’s plays, there
is a broad current of intense humanity which preserves his work
)rom the ravages of time. Strife is not an ephemeral pamphlet
but a study of the spirit of diehardism, that robs men of their
discretion, warps their judgment, and leads to bitter conflict and
suffering. Justice deals with the blindness of the judicial system;
it was blind in the Greeks and Romans and there is no reason
to suppose it will not be blind in future. The system may change,
but the lack of understanding and foresight shown by common
humanity will persist, and lead to suffering such as was experienced
by Faldcr

Galsworthy’s moral purpose and reformative tone.

Galsworthy had infinite sympathy for his downtrodden and
crushed characters He was pained by the conditions prevailing in
socie^ty, and it was his hearty desire to reform the evils of our social,
life. But Galsworthy could not be a blatant propagandist like
Shaw. He suggested reform in his dramas, but the tone of the re-
former is hu^hed and muffled. That he intended to introduce
reform in society through his plays cannot be gainsaid. There is
hardly any one of his plays which does not convey a message or a
lesson. There is a moral note in each one of his plays. He believed
that every work of art should have a moral or a “Spire of mean-
ing.” “‘A drama” he has himself pointed out, “must be so shaped
as to have a spire of meaning. Every grouping of life and character
has its inherent moral and the business of the dramatist is to
pose the group as to bring that moral poignantly to the light of
day.” Didacticism was the main spring of his art. His didacticism
is aot obtrusive. His dramas have, strictly speaking, not a moral
which may be obtrusive but a spire of meaning which develops
itself as naturally from the drama as a spire completes
^he structure of a Gothic church. The public gets this mea-

* Di. R. C Gupta ; The Problem Play.

( 478 )

ningy net through a coarse melodramatic Opposition of villain
and hero (as in the older dramas), not even through any intellcc
tual argument, but through emotional sympthy with characters
presented in such a way as to appeal to the spectator’s sense of
truth and justice.

In Strife the moral is that we should not be adamant and
head-strong in our view but should seek honourable compromise
over issues with cannot be resolved without sacrifice of principle.
In Loyalties he denounces racial prejudice and pleads for just
social treatment to all classes of people in society. In Siher-Box
he desires to avoid the evils of unemployment and pleads for
sympathy for the waifs and derelicts of society and so on.

Plot Construction

In his book The Inn of Tranquillity Galsworthy makes a
pregnant observation about plot costruction. He poir ts out,
“A good plot is that sure edifice which rises out of the interplay
of circumstances on temperament and of temperament on circums-
tances, within the enclosing atmosphere of an idea.” The plots
of Galsworthy’s plays are based on ideas and hang on charac-
ters, The stories of Gals worthy’s plays receive their signi-
ficance from the characters and the ideas that are interwoven in
them. Each play of Galsworthy has a theme, and every
incident happening in the scene contributes to the furtherance of
the theme. The theme is grounded on the idea evolved in
the play.

Galsworthy’s plot construciion is based on a situation or
incident, and the reaction of a few characters to that situation.
The loss of money in Loyalties is the starting point* and the
play unfolds, as different characters present their reaction to the
alleged charge of theft on Captain Dancy.

The plots of Gal Worthy have real, critical, pleasant climaxes
and surprises, that keep up the interest of the play and save them
from being jejune and dull. R. H. Coats refers to the climax and
surprises in Galsworthy’s plots in an admirable manner. He
says, ‘ On the whole, Galsworthy’s climaxes are good. They are
not included in literary play, but where they do occur, they are
reached naturally and inevitably by a kind of Wre poidting
forward and acceleration from the beginniog.” The element of

( 479 )

^u^pense is also maintained in his plays. In the Silvcr-Box our
suspense is kept tight to the end. We do not know whether
pick Barthwick would be punished in the same manner as
Jones. In Loyalties we hold our breath till the perpetrator of the
91C00 robbery is discovered. In Escape we are ill at case so
long as the fate of Denant is not decided. In Justice, when two
advocates plead for and against Falder, we are kept in suspense
till the judge announces judgment. There is a dexterous
manage men t of suspense in the Eldest Son where previous to
the arrival of Sir William at a critical point in the play, the
taniily anxiously discusses what his attitude to Bill and Freda
is likely to be.

One special feature of Galsworthy’s plot contraction is
the employment of the technique of parallelism. In Silver Box
there is a parallelism between Jack and Jones, and the same is
!-oticed in Skin Game between Hillcrist and Harbowler.

Galsworthy’s architectural instinct »n plot construction is
also a special feature of his art. He builds the structure of his
plot like an architect. The edihee reared by him is perfect in
harmony and symmetry. There is no lopsidedness in his plays.
Each play stands a^ a perfect whole. Rci erring to this archi-
tectural quality of Galsworthy’s plays |, W, Marriott remarks,
“Galsworthy’s architectural instinct for symmetry and poise was
just a trifle too strong. The artistic conscience which controlled
his writing corresponds to the social conscience which controlled
his daily life”’*'

Characterisation.

Galsworthy's characters arc drawn from common life.
His per^onages range between the accidental thief and the middle
class member of Parliament, the workman and the company
director, the chaiw'oman and the colonel wife. His heroes are
common men and rarely do we come across in his tragic plays
heroes of the dimension of King Lear, Macbeth or Othello.

Galsworthy’s characters are evolved from the impact of
situations. They advance and grow as the drama unfolds the
idea underlying each play.

^ J. W, Marriott : Modern Drama.

( 480 )

Gaisvirocthy’s chatactets ate types rather than individuals.
His -characters are embodiments of certain ideas^ and henct
they tend to be types rather than individual figures.

Galsworthy’s heroes and heronies are highly emotional. Brnotion
is the stuff of their life. The characters of Shaw are generally inte-
llectual, and stand well contrasted with the emotional characters oi
Galsworthy. The characters of Galsworthy fail to give proper
and adequate expiession to their emotional feelings. They are
subdued and fail to give proper veniilation to their feelings.
‘‘One cannot help contrasting Galsworthy’s characters with those
of Bernard Shaw, whose char icters are all articulate to the
point of volubility. There is no need to guess their emotions;
they expound them with wonderful lucidity. But in the case of
Galsworthy, it often happens that an incoherent ejaculation ot a
clumsy gesture is more eloquent than a fine speech because it
hints at the unplumbed depths of agony suffered by the dumb
animals of the human race.”* There is much force in Galsworthy’s
own admission about his characters when he says, ‘'About Shaw’s
plays one might say that they contain characters who express
emotions which they do not possess. About mine one might
say that they contain characters who possess emotions which
they cannot express.”

Broadly speaking the characters of Galsworthy are purely
English. They are dominated by traits common to English men
and women. There is little theatricality about them. They are
the product of a naturalistic technique, and hence there is truth
and verisimilitude in their presentation. W,e recognise the ordinary
humanity in Galsworthy’s characters. Schalit rightly remarks,
“Galsworthy’s characters are dire in action, never farfetched or
self stultifying. They are always drawn from the average man
and woman of our immediate surroundings. From the very
outset he surrounds his characters with a peculiar atmosphere
of its own and maintains it throughout and thus in each case
has something faithful, something inevitable about it.”

Galsworthy’s thumb-nail sketches of characters introduced
in stage direction are equally impressiTe, The hints presented

* j. Marriott : Modern Dramai

( 481 )

)y the stage reptesentation of chatactets aie enough to make the
;haxactex stand out before us in cleat outline. Edward Fillarton
s reptesented on the stage ^*as one of those clean shaven naval
nen of good presence who has returned from sea but not from
heir susceptibilities.”

In characterisation^ Galsworthy scores a triumph over
3ernard Shaw. The characters of the Shavian plays are all mouth-
pieces through which the dramatist propagates his theories. They
ict and talk as the dramatist likes them to, and in their move-
ments there is always some wire pulling from behind. As a result
oi this, the Shavian characters have been mere lifeless machines.
But Galsworthy never allows his personality to intrude into his
plays. His characters move and act according to dramitic needs.
They have been brought down from an intellectual to a human
level and as such they never cease to impress or interest us.
'^Since the characters must be deliberately posed in order to
carry out a pattern they are hardly likely to be inspired with a
life of their own. Perhaps this will explain why he has created
few great personalities who have an existence outside the plays-
personalities like Cyrano de Bergerac, Peter Pan or Sir John
FalstafF.”*

Though Galsworthy has not been able to create characters
of the same excellence as Shakespeare, yet he has also created
some nice characters which may be taken as types rather than as
individuals. We have such fine characters in Galsworthy as John
Anthony in Strife, Mrs. Jones in The Silver Box; Falder in
Justice, Captain Dancy in Loyalties and these characters cannot be
forgotten. We shall always remember the stubborn rigidity of
purpose in Anthony, Cordelia like simplicity and sincerity in Mrs.
Jones, intense restlessness in Captain Dancy, and tragic irony in
Falder.

Dialogues.

Galsworthy lays great emphasis on dialogues. In Some
Platitudes Concerning Drama he writes about the importance of
dialogue in an effective play— “The art of writing true dramatic
dialogue is an austere art, denying itself all licence, grudging

* J. W. Marriott ; Modern Drama.

( 482 )

every sentence devoted to the mere machinery of th play,
supposing all jokes and epigrams served from character, relying
for fun and pathos as the fun and tears of life. From start to
finish good dialogue is hand-made like good lace; clear ^ of fine
texture^ furthering with each thread the harmony and strength of
a design to which all must be subordinated*'^

The dialogues of Galsworthy are pointed and sharp though
they lack the play of corruscating wit present in the sparkling
dialogues of Bernard Shaw. Galsworthy's dialogues are effective
in the presentation of tragic emotion of a subdued character.
His dialogues ace generally short and to the point though there
aie long speeches as well here and there as Frome’s speech in
Justice, SitxA Anthony’s defence of capitalism in Strife.

His Craftsmanship.

Galsworthy is a great craftsman in his dramatic art. He
knows the art of plot construction, and of giving to his plot a
keen sense of dramatic effectiveness. He manages bis plots with
economy, restraint and concentration. Every word beats on the
action or reveals character or suggests the attitude which
Galsworthy desires his spectators to take. The same artistic
thrift is seen in bis stage directions also. Stage directions in
modem drama are always very important, but some dramatists,
like Shaw, carry their stage directions to the^ length of an essay.
Galsworthy never errs in this respect. He never Says too much,
but at the same time, he never omits any single detail which is
important.

Galsworthy’s dramatic effectiveness.

We do not, however, claim for Galsworthy the Shakespearean
genius of portraying that 'double-conflict’, conflict with the
elemental forces and simultaneously conflict with conscience, but
nevertheless, this much credit must be given to Galsworthy that he
has succeeded in creating some very fine dramatic moments by a
few subtle hints and suggestions. Such dramatic moments are
present in all his plays. In Strife the two unbending leaders of
Capital and Labour respectively are deserted by their followers
CO force a compromise. They stare at each other and there is in

^ J. Galsworthy ; Some Platitudes Concerning Drama.

( 483 )

their looks a dramatic intensity that keeps us spell bound for
sometime. Let us note the words —

Roberts : **Thcn you are no longer Chairman of this
company ? (Breaking into half- mad laughter) Ah ha ah ha, ha 1
TheyVe thrown you, over-thrown their chairman Ah-ha ha ! (with
a sudden dreadful calm) So they’ve done us both down, Mr.
Anthony ?” •

^^Anthony rises with an effort. He turns to Roberts, who
looks at him. They stand several seconds, gazing at each other,
fixedly ; Anthony lifts his hand, as though to salute, but lets it
fall. The expression of Robert’s face changes from hostility

to wonder ”

Play of Irony,

In Galsworthy’s dramatic art Dramatic Irony as well as
Irony of Life are presented with great care and astuteness. There
is a note of irony in all his plays. It has become a part of
Galsworthy’s art. For example, in Justice the machinery which the
Law has devised for dispensing justice, results in producing
marked injustice. In Strife Capital and Labour come into collision
causing untold suffering and wastage to all concerned. When both
parties are thoroughly exhausted, they strive at a compromise, the
terms of which ace exactly the same as had been proposed before
the quarrel began and which had been contemptuously rejected by
both the patties then. Tench the Secretary, reveals the irony of
the situation in the concluding lines of the drama.

Tench (stating at Harness— Suddenly excited. Do you
know. Sir— these terms, they are the very sam we drew up together
you and I, and put to both sides before the fight began ? All
this — all this — and what for ?

Harness (In a slowgrim voice)

That’s where the fun comes in.

Conclusion.

The general effect left on our mind after reading Galsworthy’s
plays is one of despair and gloom. His dramatic world is mainly
grey. His tragic plays arc for the most part serious, even
sombre. But he is not a pessimist There is a ray of hope that the
lot of human beings would be better in the world to come. He
believe; that the cause of tragedy in social life lies failure of

( <84 )

sympathy and imagination, and he hopes that’ human lot is capable
of amel location*

Q. 109 What is Galsworthy*s conception of tragedy and
irony ? What brings about tragedy in bis plays ?

Ans. Galsworthy, unlike Becnacd Shaw, had specialised
in writing tragedies. Shaw is a comedian, and Galsworthy is a
tragedian. The tragedies of human life exercised a powerful hold
on Galsworthy’s mind, and he produced social tragedies marked
with irony and waste. His principal plays : Vhe Fu^itive^ The Mob^
Justice^ Loyalties and Old English ate all tragedies resulting in the
deaths of the heroes. Other plays of Galsworthy, in which death
does not occur but sufFecing is of an oppres.«ive character, ace
Silver Box, Skin Game and Strife. They are all social tragedies.
In the former five plays there is tragedy in the sense that the
frustrated hero meets his . tragic death in circumstances which
produce gloom and despair. In the later three plays there is
tragedy resulting in hardship, frustration and waste to the
main characters of the play. In all the plays there is tragic gloom
and despair, and a sense of frustration and waste pyerpoweriog
us at the end.

' What is the cause of all this tragic gloom and despair io
Galsworthy’s plays ? Why do we have tragedies at all ? Can they
not be ayerted ?

Galsworthy’s tragic conception is different from the Greeks
and the Elizabethan tragedy writers The Greeks belieyed in
the power of fate in bringing about tragedy. Gods were against
poor mortals and hence they hurled thunder^bolcs on them.
Tragedy in human life was an act of diyine dispensation resulting
in gloom and despair in human life. The change in this fata-
listic conception of tragedy upheld by the Greeks was sounded
by the Elizabethans particularly by Shakespeare who belieyed
that the cause of tragedy lay in some fatal Daw in the character
of the hero. Tragedy was mainly the outcome of a person’s
own frailties. Gods and supernatural powers had little to do
with human tragedies, though some uncontrollable circumstances
added to the tragic happenings in the plays. The tragedy of
Hamlet was principally due to his wavering and.«vainlkting

( 485 )

natute. Macbeth and Lady MacHeth ttict their tragic doom due
to over-ambition and Othello met his end as the result of his

credulity

Galsworthy*s conception of tragedy is different boih from
the Greeks and the Bliaabethans. Tragedy in Gab worthy is the
outcome not so much of human Iratlties of character or divine
dispensation^ as the result of mal- social -adjustment and big
social forces working against a weak human character. The
tragic characters of Galsworthy* Falder, Jones, Dancy are weak-
lings, and it is not possible for them to defend themselves against
forceful social forces which crush them at the end. No doubt,
these tragic characters of Galsworthy have some flaws of character,
but their little frailties urould not have resulted in grim and gfuc-
some tragedies if the mighty social forces had not been pitted
against them. Galsworthy lays greater force on social machi-
nery, particularly the legal machinery for dispensing justice for
the cause of the tragedy than on the frailties of his characters.
It is this over emphasis on social forces and institutions as the
principal grinding force in human life that turns tragedies of
Galsworthy into social tragedies. The cause of tragedy in
Galsworthy’s plays is the crushing nature of big institutions and
big organizations pitted against the erring and yet feeble
mortals.

In Silver Box^ Jones and his wife suffer because the rolling
engine of law crushes them. “The real villain is neither Jones
nor Jack Barthwick, but the judicial system for which we arc
all responsible. The audience is in the docks confronted with the
crime of having approved that system,” In Justice Faldcr is the
victim of a system of law that fails to distinguish a hardened
criminal from a social weakling. The law crushes the miserable
and the weak as it crushes the poor.

The tragedies of Galsworthy give the impression of tremen-
dous waste. Poor characters like Jones and Falder arc crushed
mercilessly under a system that is rotten to the core. There is
misery apd suffering for all classes of people because we cannot set
aright the vitiated legal machinery that oppresses the poor
more than the rich. The sense of waste in Galsworthy's plays
furthes brought about by unnecessary bickerings and struggles

( 486 )

among people without any sense of broad vision in life
Pugnacity in human nature is the Icause of much waste and
frustration in human life^ In Strife^ there is waste»: suffering
and tragedy among the poor labourers because of pugnacity,
bickering and shoit-sightedness on the part of Anthony the
leader of the capitalists. In the Skin Game there is waste due
to a lack of understanding between the landed gentry and the
new capitalistic class. Much of the waste in social life can be
temoved if human beings develop a sense of sympathy and
mutual understanding.

Unfortunately human beings fail to develop the broad
vision that might set things aright. Therein comes the play of
irony in Galsworthy’s tragedies. The irony in Justice is that the
machinery which the Law has devised for dispensing justice
results in producing marked injustice. In Strife Capital and
Labour come into collision causing untold suffering to all
concerned in the industry. When both parties are thoroughly
exhausted, they strive at a compromise, the teems of which are
exactly the same as had been proposed before the quarrel
began and which had been contemptuously rejected by both
Che parties then. Tench, the secretary, reveals the irony of the
situation in the concluding lines of the drama.

** Tench (staring at Harness, suddenly excited) D’you know.
Sir, — these terms, they’re the very same we drew up together,
you and I, and put to both sides before the fight began ? All
this — all this — and what for ?

Harness (in a slow, grim voice). That's where the fun
comes in 1”

There is^always an undercurrent of irony in Galsworthy's
tragedies which is more impressive than open denunciation of
the! social system. **Irony of ironies” says the dramatist^ *‘aii
is irony.” He leaves the audience to discover it.

^'The irony in Gals n worthy does not breed pessimism as it
does in the novels of Hardy. Hardy’s world is. quite different
from the world of Galsworthy. Hardy believes that not only
the social institutions are malignant, but the whole ; ludiverse
is against, the progress of man, virtue can never ; flcMarish); that
vice escapes without punishment. This dark dismal view of

( 487 )

nature is not shared by Galsworthy. He believes that there is no
:onscious ill will or malice in nature against man, but the social
nstitutions man has set up are against his progress.”

Galsworthy’s tragedies are gloomy and the impression of
yfcyness overpowers us. But the gloom is not Cimmerian. There
s some iTay of hope that if human beings entrenched in power
ind authority cultivate sympathy and a humanitarian outlook
ind big institutions and social and legal machinery are reformccl
Tiany social tragedies can be averted. This is the underlying
hope in eqch one of Galsworthy’s social tragedies.

Q. HO. ^‘Galsworthy has no heroes and no villains.” Discuss
Ans. The study of Galsworthy’s social plays and social tragedies
rlearly reveals the absence of heroes found in classical tragedies ol
incient Greece, Marlowian tragedies and the tragedies of
>hakespeare during the Elizabethan age. In these old tragedies of
I remote age the heroes were drawn from ranks of higher life, and
vere endowded with heroic qualities of valour, heroism, ambition
ind kingly glory. Eminent persons from the higher strata of life
vere the heroes of classical, Elizabethan, and Restoration heroic
lagedies. Agamemnon, King Lear, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth,
\utengzeb were heroes in the real sense of the term. But in the
ase of Galsworthy we do not come across heroes of the type
iflunciated above. Galsworthy’s heroes are drawn from the
common stock of ordinary humanity and are subject to the
railties and foibles to which all of us arc subject. The heroes df
"alsworthy are not men of superhuman strength like the heroes of
he heroic tragedies of Dryden and Otway, nor are they fired with
nordinate ambition like Macbeth. They do not have the intros
l^ectivc and psychologi cal ratiocination of Hamlet, nor do they
^ave the incredible credulity of Othello. There is nothing of the
atensely heroic in the heroes of Galsworthy like Jones, Palder,
ind Roberts.

Galsworthy’s plays are problem plays. They arc social
tagedies, based upon the sorrows and sufFciings brought about
0 common men and women by the maladjustment of society
nd the evil social forces such as the system of legal justice
prevalent to our society. In such tragedies a hero of the type

( 488 )

of Maclowian hera would have beeo out of place. Instead of
submitting to the forces mtlitating against his powerful ambition,
he would have hurled deAance and stubbornly stood against all
social inhibitions. Such a hero would have been out of place
in a social tragedy like the Siher Box and Justice in which the
hero is crushed by a powerful social machinery, particularly the
machinery of legal dispensation that makes no difference between
a hardened criminil and a weakling. For social tragedies,
Galsworthy needed heroes, who were neither militant nor defiant,
but meek, docile and easily expressible. The force of the social
tragedies would have been lost if hero had been a powerful man
going down after a bitter and uncompromising hostility against
a ruthless social system. The force and pity of Galsworthy's
social tragedies would have been lost in the presence of such
heroes of fire and fury though ultimately signifying nothing. Hence
to make his social tragedies pathetic and appealing to the
better sense of humanity, he has created tragic heroes, who
are weak, supine, nerveless, without anything of that great-
ness which Aristotle had outlined for tragic heroes in his Poetics^
Goats makes a pointed reference to the pathetic tone of
Galsworthy’s tragedies in the following lines, ‘*Thc power of
the law or the mob or capitalistic society so overwhelms the
individual, whether innocent or guilty, that he is rendered
impotent. So disproportionate arc the protagonists that struggle
seems useless and tears are vain. The result is that whereas in
classical and romantic tragedy the hero is so wrestless with fate
or villainy that he rises superior to disaster even when over
whelmed by it, and thus awakens in us feelings of admiration anc
reverential awe. Social tragedy of Galsworthy’s type moves u
cither to sentiments of compassion.”

Let us examine a few heroes of Galsworthy. Jones i
Silver Box is one type. He is a poor man and it is very diffiicul
for him to make both cods meet. He has a wife and childtef
He tries to bring them up decently. In a moment of lassitud
he picks up the silver box dropped by Barthwick. He is pr
secuted for that, and he goes down whinning under a leg
system which he cannot oppose. He is the victim of social co
venttons, and he cannot powerfully raise his voice against the

i 489

i

Faldcr in Justice is another weakling. He commits forgery, but
after that he has no stamina to stand the trial. He commits
suicide at the end because he hnds the social forces too strong
for him. These tragic heroes of Galsworthy evoke pity and
sympathy, rather than awe and administration. They d(»
not struggle and as such they fail to win our applause.

'j bey are pathetic rather than heroic characters. They are the
victims of a perverted and twisted social system.

These tragic heroes of Galsworthy are quite in keeping
with the democratic traditions of the modern <igc. The twentieth
century is the age of common man, rather than kings and prin-
ces. The com non man of democracy has come into his own during
the present century. In conformity with the needs of the time,
dramatists have changed the ethos of drama. Galsworthy's tragic
heroes are common men, and they are presented in social rela-
tionship with the powerful social institutions and machinexv
working in society. Jones in Silver B>x is a very common man,
a servant in the Barthwick family. Palder is a clerk, who commits
forgery in a state of social distress. He is a weakling Even
captain Dancy in Loyalties is not the brasshat, but a common
soldier, who commits suicide at the end. All these heroes of
Galsworthy are corpmon men and arc the product of the modern
democratic and socialistic age. They arc the products of the
modern age of realism and tragic waste. They could n >t have
been created in any other age except our own. Coats has rightly
touched on the social, democratic, and rerilistic aspects of
Galsworthy's heroes in the following words, “Galsworthy usually
refuses to heighten his characters by putting them on pedestals
or exalting them to more than ordinary proportions. To do this
would be an offence against realism and would at the same time
involve a failure to emphasize the social aspect of modern tragedy.
/ ccordingly he makes the majority of his characters mediocre and
even mean, that wc may the more readily recognise in them out
ordinary selves.”*

Just as there arc no tragic heroes of the dimensions of the

tragic heroes of the Restoration heroic tragedies or tragic hero

* Coats : Galsworthy

( 490 )

i

of the Elizabethan times, similarly there is the absence of
powerful and crooked villains like lago and Bosola in Galsworthy’s
social tragedies. The question of unmitigated villains like lago
and Edmund does not arise when there are no heroes match-
ing their subtlety and crooked ingenuity. The classical concep-
tion of a villain is neither accepted by Galsworthy nor practised
by him in his tragedies. Galsworthy seems to follow Meredith’s
dictum :

In tragic life, God wot

No villain need he ! passions spin the plot.

The role of the villain in Galsworthy’s social tragedies is
taken by society and the audience. In place of one single inc^ivi-
dual who plays the role of the villain in bringing about tragedy,
like lago in Shakespeare’s Othello, the vitiated and corrupted
social system and the audience that tolerate it constitute the villain
in Galsworthy’s social tragedies. T^ke for example The Silver
Box. Who is the villain in this tragedy ? The villain is neither
Jack Barthwick nor his father, but the vitiated social machinery
that brings untold misery to the poor and shields the rich from
the iron clutches of law. J. W. Marriott directs our attention to
the villain in Silver Box. He says, “The real villain is neither
Jones nor Jack Barthwick, but the judicial system for which wc
are all responsible. The audience is in the dock, confronted with
the crime of having approved that system.”’*' The same is appli-
cable to Justice. Here the villain is again the big and yet hollow
machinery of law that fails to make a distinction between the
hardened criminal and the spineless weakling like Palder. In
Galsworthy’s plays there are no dic4iard villains who seek to
bring the downfall of the hero through evil stratagems and
machinations of their own like Edmund in King Lear and lago
in Othello.

Q 111. ‘‘This might be said of Shaw’s plays that he
creates chatacters who express feelings which they have not got.
It might be said of mine thac I create characters who have
feelings which they cannot express.” (Galsworthy) Discuss.

Ans Galsworthy makes a subtle and appre^ative distinc-

* J. W. Marriott : Modern Drama.

( 491 )

tion between the characters created by Bernard Shaw and
his own self in his plays. There is much truth in Galsworthy's
observation about the Shavian and Galsworthian characters.

The characters of Bernard Shaw arc generally speaking
intellectual and rational. They are dominated by wit and intellec-
tuality rather than by emotions and sentiments. They are the
creations of the intellect rather than pure passion and emotion.
They are forced to express feelings and emotions which they do
not strongly feel, but which they arc required t'> express just for
the exigencies of the stage. They express their supposed or real
emotions with exuberance and lucidity

The characters of Galsworthy, on the other hand, arc not
intellectual or witty, but creatures of emotion and passion, which
they cannot adequately express in words. Their hearts are full
of emotion and powerful feelings, but they are not the masters
of language and emotional expression.

This distinction between the characters of Shaw and
Galsworthy is nicely presented by J. W. Marriott in Modern
Drama, He says, *^Thcrc is always conflict in Galsworthy's
drama, and there is always an undercurrent of irony which is
more impressive than open denunciation. The characters arc
unable to express their sense of wrong, but their very inarti-
culateness is moving. One cannot help contrasting these methods
with those of Mr. Bernard Shaw, whose characters are all
articulate to the point of volubility. There is no need to guess
their emotions ; they expound them with wonderful lucidity.
But it often happens (as in the case of Galsworthy s characters)
that an incoherent ejaculacion or a clumsy gesture is more
eloquent than a fine speech because it bints at the unplumbed
depths of agony suffered by the dumb animals of the human
race.”*

Let us first examine a few characters of Bernard Shaw.
Take up the case of Raina and Bluntsclili in Arms and the Man*
Most of them arc intellectual characters, and though they
express emotions of love, yet we can certainly feel that the
emotional expression is forced rather than an outcome of powerful

* J. W. Marriott : Modern Drama.

( 49J )

feelings of love and sentiment. Bluntschli is a practical soldic:
and is not the creature of emotion. Me loves Raina, but he u
never exuberant and emotijnal in his expression. Raina» too, i
a creature of the intellect though she is a woman and ought tc
have more of emotion than intellect. Hei emotional feeling
expressed to Sergius seem to be forced. Shaw has purged botl
these characters of mere sentiment, and has made them witt^
and sharp. In Candida^ the heroine is not the creature oi
emotions, though she is lost in the tangle of lo/e between he]
husband Morell ani her admirer Marchbank. She is not passionate
Tne emotions expressed by her with lucidity are not felt in tht
blood but lelt in the soul. She gives exprci^sion to bet emotions
which are not deeply felt. Her emotions are under the control
of her commonsense. In Man and Superman^ emotion is supp-
ressed by discussion and philosophical disquisition on the value
of life force. Ann and Tanner are the creatures of a theory, and
voice Shaw*8 feelings about life force. The emotion of love that
superficially binds them is not given a heart felt expression. In
Apple Cart^ King Magnet is an intellectual character, and the
manner in which he upsets the apple cart of the Prime Ministei
Proteus clearly shows the dominance of his intellect over emotion?
He is also an emotional creature and has his love affair with :
lady of questionable morality. His expression of love to tha
lady is more intellectual than emotional, and the flow of emotioi
is suppressed by the rush of philosophical wisdom embodied if
the expression.

The characters of Galsworthy are more emotional that
intellectual creatures. Galsworthy’s plays are social tragedies
and tragic emotion in them is well saturated even to the deepes
core of the play. His theme is intellectual, some social problen
that needs intellrctual handling, but in the course of the manf
pula t ion of the plof, the intellectual tone is hushed and mufSec
by humanitarian or emotional considerations. His character
grapple with the problem on an intellectual plain, but soof
emotion and sentiment overpower them, and the intellectual ton«
is subdued by the emotional temper. In Loyalties the play start
with the problem ot theft. It is a highly complicated situatiofl
How cculd the mono / ot De Levis be stolen when it was kep*

( 495 )

Jit a sale place ? It is a case for the Scotland Yard police^ and
needs a Sherlock Holmes to unravel the mystery. But as tu j
play moves ahead this intellectual tone is subdued^ and the
^Tiotional and sentimental side come on the surface. All the
chnfacters are swayed awiy by emotions. The emotion of Christian
brotherhood leads them to denounce De Levis, the Jew. They
are swept away by the force of racial discrimination, and lose
themselves in denunciition of the Jew. But they do not have
ianguage to express their emotion of hatred for the Jew in the
same language in which Gcatiano and Antonio express the hatred
tor the Jew» Shylock, in Sh ikes pea re’s Merchant of Venice. Their
emotional exuberance is not adequately expressed in words.
They have feelings of hatred for the Jew, but they cannot properly
express that feeling. That is the tragedy not only of the Christians
but also of De Levis the Jew who cannot adequately express himself
in defence of his race. His emo ionil feelings for the Jewish race
do not have that exuberance of expression which we co ne across
in the utterances of Shylock the Jew. We can illustrate these
remarks about the Christian characters of the play as well as the
lew from the following lines fron the play* Canygne denounces
the Jew, but his emotional fervour is without the fervour it ought
to hivc. He says, have some knowledge of the world. Once
an acciisation like this passes beyond these walls no one can
foresee the consequences. Captain Dancy is a gallant fellow, with
'* tine record as a soldier; and only just married. If he s as
innocent as Christ, mud will stick to him, unless the real thief
is found. In the old days of sword, either you or he would not
have gone out of this room alive. If 50 U persist in this accusation,
ycu will both go out of this room dead in the eyes of
society, you for bringing it, he for being the object ot it.” De Levis
u better in expression of emotion than Canygc, but even he docs
not come to the level of Shylock.. His words, “society 1 Do you
think 1 don’t know that Tm only tolerated for my money.
Society can’t add injury to insult and have my money as well,
thu’s all. If the notes arc restored I’ll keep my mouth shut;
if they’re not, I shan’t. I am certain Tam right.’ There is
sincerity in what De Levis sa)S, but the ring of emotional
fervour is wanting in them.

(f 494 }

Wc can turn to Siher Box. The uttrraiices of Mrs. Joqcs
and Mr. Jones tack emotional fervour. They speak in a mannei
which brings out their emotional excitement, but the words
uttered by them are not hot like lava. They arc cold like the
burnt out cinders. Here is an example. Mr. Jones speaks hi&
mind to the magistrate, “I have to do no more than wot be, as
Tm a poor man. IVe got no money and no friends — he’s a toff—
he can do what 1 can’t.’* Mr. Barthwick's sympathy fot the
poor is also pitched in a subdued key. Here are bis words,
^*This prosecution goes very much against the grain with me. 1
have great sympathy with the poor. In my position I am bound
to recognize the distress there is amongst them. The condition ot
the people leaves much to be desired.”

In Justice the expressions of Falder are emotional, but
their expression is not perfervid. Palder is a weakling and cannot
give adequate expression to his feelings.

Many other examples can be given from Galsworthy's
plays to show that his characters are emotional, but they cannot
give full-blooded and fervent expression to their feelings. There
are many characters in Galsworthy’s plays who suffer silently
witliout any protest. There are scenes where characters stand
without saying a word, though the atmosphere is surcharged
with emotional fervour and needs forceful expression. Galsworthy’s
characters art highly strung and emotional in their make-up, but
they cannot adequately express their pent up feelings in a
language that may take the audience off its feet, and win
applause for their perfervid oratory. The characters leave the
impression not of emotional starvation, but lack of proper
expression. More is meant in their utterances than meets the
ear. They are suggestive, and their emotional speeches should be
interpreted in a sympathetic inanner. Then alone can we under-
stand the full significance of Galsworthy’s emotional characters.

Q. 112. Give a brief account of the main plays of Bernard
Shaw?1856— 19Sii)

Ans. Bernard Shaw has written a number of plays. The
following are the prominent plays of the celebrated dramatist

Widowers' Houses Arms an^ the Hah {V&9Ai)t Candida

( 495 )

(1895)» The Devil* s Disciple (1897), Mrs. Warren* s Profession
(IS98), You Never Can Tell (1899), Caesar and Cleopatra (1899),
Captain Brass- Bound* s Conversion (1900), Man and Superman
(1903), John BulPs Other Island (1904), Major Barbara (1905),
The Doctor* s Dilemma (1906), Androcles and the Lion (1913),
Pygmalion (1913), Heart Break House (1919), Back to Methuselah
(1921), Saint Joan (1923), The Apple Cart (1928), On the Rocks
'1933).

Let us ciitically examine some of the plays.

1. Widowers’ Houses (1892).

Shaw’s first play Widowers* Houses was not finished till
1892, although he had made an unsuccessful effort at dramatic
collaboration with William Archer seven years earlier. This play
is written on the subject of slum landlordism. Shaw himscli
describes it thus ; “I perversely distorted it to be a grotesquely
realistic exposure of slum landlordism, municipal jobbery, and
the pecuniary and matrimonial tics between them and the peasant
people with independent’ income who imagine that such sordid
matters do not touch their own lives.” This satirical invention
of the author was combined with a good deal of farcical triviality
with the result that a serious subject was treated with a degree
of annoying non-seriousness. This play should be described as an
economic treatise in dramatic form. The characters are mostly and
intentionally represented as hypocrites and humbugs. The English
men brought out in this play are obtuse, thick-skinned, unimagi-
native and humourless. These Englishmen, like Cokanc ‘might be
compared with the buffoons of an earlier tradition : the Vice of
the medieval drama and the Fool of the Elizabethan before the

had been transformed by Shakespeare from a buffoon into a
philosophic and poetic genius.”

2. The Philanderer.

It is a telling satire upon physical science, though enlivened
with fine strokes of comedy. Dr. Paramorc is a young strenuous
physician, who has discovered a new disease, and is delighted
when he finds people suffering from it and cast down to despair
when he finds that it does not exist. In other words, it is a
sharp expofure of the dangers of ‘idealism’, the sacrifice of people
to principles. He points out that excessive idealism exists nowhere

( 496 )

SO much as in the realm of physical science. The scientist
to be more concerned about sickness than about the sick i
This theme of Dr. Paramore's disease is at once a most fan
philosophic thing in the play.

3 Mrs. Warren’s Profession*

It is a play based on the theme of prostitution. G
Chesterton comments on it thus: *‘lt is concerned with a co
mother and a cold daughter : the mother drives the ordinary
dirty trade of harlotry; the daughter does not knov till the
I he atrocious origin of all her own comfort and refinement,
daughter, when the discovery is made, freezes up into an icet
of contempt, which is indeed a very womanly thing to do so.
mother explodes into pulverizing cynicism which is
very womanly. The dialogue is drastic and sweeping;
daughter says the trade is loathsome; the mother answers i
she loathes it herself; that every healthy person does loathe
trade by which she lives. And beyond question the gea
effect of the play is that the trade is loathsome; suppos
anyone to be so insensible as to require to be told of the fi
^Undoubtedly, the upshot is that a brothel is a miserable busin
and a brothel keeper a miserable woman. The whole dram
art of Shaw is, in the literal sense of the word, tragi comic
mean that the comic part comes after the tragedy. On acco
of the theme of the play 'it was banned by the Censor of pi
and aroused a storm of protest from several quarters.”

4. Arms and the Man-

It was acted for the first time in April, 1894- It is
amusing exposure of the glory of war and romantic love,
story is based on an incident in a war between Bulgaria i
Austria in 1885. The Petkoffs, represent an aristocratic Bulg^i
family consisting of Major Petkoff, his wife Catherine and
daughter Raina whose head is full of romance and who U
love with Sergius claimed to be a military hero. Into this cii
enters a common soldier, Biuntschli, a Swiss, who has
the Serbian army as a mercenary soldier. He has no illn^'
about war, places the naked truth ^bout it when he happen^
seek shelter in Raina’s bedchamber one night from the
shooting of the Bulgarians. **The Swiss soldier behaved as

( 497 ,

maintained a soldier actually docs behave, not as the conventions
of Victorian melodrama would have a soldier behave : the play
exhibited what Shaw called “natural morality*’ as against the
“romantic morality” of those who objected to it. The plot is
cleverly developed to show that the hero of Raina’s dreams,
Sergius is really a humbug, and his so called military exploits
and glory are mere sham. He is not only a false hero on the battle-
field but also in love. Though in love with and engaged to
Raina, he flirts with the servant-maid Louka, In course ot time
it is found out that Raina herself cares more for her ‘chocolate
cream soldier/ Bluntschli, than for her professed lover, Sergius.
Thus Sh iw tears the mask off the face of sentimentality surroun-
ding war and the equally foolish approach t > love. Shaw’s satire
is summed up in the words of Sergius, “Oh, war the dream of
Patti 3ts and heroes— a fraud, BluntschlL A hollow sham, like
love.”

Caesar and Cleopatra.

Caesar and Cleopatra is a puritanical play based on war
against romance and heroism. In this play Shaw has produced
a play of artistic cceation in the portrait of Caciar. Caestr is
a Shavian hero. Shaw represents Caesar not so much as “best
riding the earth like a colossus,” but rather walking the earth
with a sort of stern levity, lightly touching the planet and yet
spurning it away like a stone. Caesar and Cleopatra is a note-
worthy play from many points of view. It began a new way of
handling histoiial subjects, material, inlormal, humorous, yet
full of meaning. The play contains many brilliant scenes and fine
phrases. There is no play of Shaw more certain to hold its own
on the British stage. “This play does not aim at proving any
general proposition, and comes much nearer to being a play than
most of his works written in dramatic form.”

6. Man and Superman

With the appearance of this play in 1903, Shaw proved
himself a fully matured dramatist. His apprenticeship in the realm
of drama was over; and he was able to tackle the theatre and
the dramatic form with unqualified success. In Man and Superman^
observes Ward “the ideas are more memorable than the character,
and there is little reliance upon stage utuation; but the tremen-

( 498 )

dou8 sticciag of moral and intellectual passion is cocnpensatioii
enough/’ Desciibed by the author as Comedy and a Philosophy’
this play was Bernard Shaw’s earliest full statement of his
conception oi the way of salvation for the human race through
obedience to the Life Force, the term he uses to indicate a powei
continually working upon the hearts of men and endeavouring to
impel them toarards better and fuller life. “Unlike Hardy’s
Immanent Will Shaw’s Life Force is represented as a power making
consciously towards a state of existence fat more abundantly
vital than anything yet experienced by mankind. But the Life
Force does not purpose to work unaided : Men and women
arc required to act as willing and eager agents for the furtherance
of its great work. The existing race of men, however (so Shaw
thought in 1903) was too mean-spirited and too self centred to
serve the Lifc-Focce, which would consequently be compelled to
supersede Man by a more elective instument of iis will — the
Superman. The means likely to be adopted for the production
of that higher type were suggested in Man and Superman^ where
woman is indicated as 'Nature’s contrivance for perpetuating its
achievement and Mao as “woman’s contrivance for fulfilling
Nature’s behest,’ that the Superman should be born to
replace the existing /feverish selfish little clod of ailments and
grievances.”

7. Heartbreak House (19i9).

Shaw’s doctrine of the Life Force is developed further in
two pUys- Heartbreak House and Back to Methuselah (1921)* In
Heartbreak House he gives forth a terrible warning that 'cultured
and leisured Europe will meet its doom if it did not undertake
the mission of the Life Force. This play, began in 1913, proved
to be prophetic. It was completed in 1919 and by that time
Europe had witnessed the holocaust of the World Wat. A
generation which ignored the purposes of the Life Force was like
the drunken skipper to whom comes 'the smash of the ship on
the rocks, the splintering of rotten timbers ; the tearing of her
rusty plates, the drowning of the crew like rats in a trap.’

8. Back to Methuselah.

In Back to Methuselah Shaw once again considered the
purpose of the Life Force and pronouriced a great warning that

( 499 )

if Man did not come up to the matk he would be replaced by
tnothef set of beings. Shaw's doctrine in this respect was
contrary of the theory of Natural Selection expounded by
Darwim Shaw wrote^ "This does not mean that if man cannot
find the remedy, no remedy will be found. "The power that
produces Man when the monkey was not up to mark, can
produce a higher creature than Man if man does not come up
to the mark.” What it means is that of man is to be saved, Man
must save himself. "The play is pretentious and dull showing a
most undramatic desire to reduce all human life to disembodied
speculation.” It lays emphasis on creative evolution.

9. Apple Cart

In this play Shaw deals with the problem of monarchy in
a democratic country like England. He comes to the conclusion
that the attempt to do away with the institution of monarchy
represented by King Magnus in the play will ultimately spell ruin
in society. The king is necessary to exercise a check on the
activities of democratic leaders. In this play Shaw is neither
opposed to monarchy nor democracy but to capitalism, and his
diatribes are directed against Breakages and Company that stands
in the way of all social and economic progress. "TAe Apple Cart
is one of the wisest and most genial pieces, wise not so much
because of the political acumen of King Magnus as for the dieta
on the art of self-sufficingness in the opening dialogue and on the
art of human relationships in the interlude^ which is also a
passage of sparkling comedy rarely equalled in the modern English
theatre.”

10. Candida.

It is in some ways Shaw’s masterpiece. It tackles a domes*
tic problem and^hows that it is not sentimentalism but intelli-
gence that governs life. This explains why Candida eventually
chooses the strong man Morel and not the poet, Marchbank, her
sentimental lover.

U. John 9all’$ Other Island

In this play Shaw is directing his satire at the conventional
Englishman, who is never so silly or sentimental as when he sees
silliness and sentiment in the Irishman. Broadbent, the hero of
the play,, is an Englishman, who believes that he brings reason

( 500 )

in treatinc: the Irishmen, whereas in truth they are ail smiling at
his illusions

"This play” observes Ward, "remains one of his most
effective pieces, displaying his dramatic power-mastery of rhetoric
and exalted prose, effective handling of stage situation, skill in
depicting character and sense of comedy.”

12 Major Barbara.

It reveals the materialistic pessimism of Shaw. Here he
depicts poverty as the epitome of all vices. People say that
poverty is no crime ; Shaw says that poverty is a crime. It is a
crime to endure it, a crime to be content with it, that it is the
mother of all crimes of brutality, corruption and fear.* Here the
dramatist shows that even the noblest enthusiasm of the girl who
becomes a Salvation Army Officer fails under the brute money
power of her father who is a modern capitalist. The political
philosophy of Major Barbara is essentially Marxist.

13. On the Rocks.

In this latest play On the Rocks Shaw returns to the subject
of democracy though he changes the metaphor and also thinks of
new plots and plans of attack. In his comedy he shows how a
programme of socialism is acceptable only to aristocrats and is
rejected by the leaders of the proletariat. The play is a failure
both as an exposition of Shaw*s philosophy and as a work of art.

14. Saint Joan.

Saint Joan is one of the greatest works of Shaw. Here he
presents the life of the French girl St. Joan who defied British
power and fought valiantly for the freedom of her country. Saint
Joan is captured and is burnt as a witch. Later on the great*
ness of Saint Joan is understood by the people and she is cannoni-
sed in the Christian Church. The play is on a great subject and
has a grandeur of style fully worthy of it. The trial scene
in this play is one of the greatest scenes in the whole of dramatic
literature.

"In Saint Joan Bernard Shaw reaches a higher level than
elsewhere because for once the grander emotions are involved and
the theme is a universal one lending itself to tragic drama.”
Other Plays.

Getting Married scathing criticism of home life as it

( S0\ )

;Kisted in Shaw*s time. Shaw seeks to point oat the eyiis of
maladjustment in home life in this play. You Never Cnn
Tell is a satire on the authority of parents. The Doctors
Dilemma is a skit on men of science. In Andr cles and the Lion
Shaw pleads for drastic redistribution of wealth. The Man of
Destiny is a historical play on the life of Napolean. Contem-
porary social conventions are held up to ridicule in Pygmalion
ind Shakespeare forms the subject of The Dark Lady of the
Sonnfts,

Q. J 13. Give your estimate of Bernard Shaw as a
Dramatist.

Ans. Bernard Shaw was one of the greatest dramatists of
:he 20th Century, and by some critics he is considered next to
Shakespeare in the hierarchy of English dramatists. \t the lime
nrhen Shaw made his debut on the English stage, drama was
slowly struggling to rise from the torpor into which it had fallen
iuring the nineteenth century. The period between .1779 and
1876 is dramatically barren and hardly a play produced during
this sterile period has survived except as a literary curiosity. It
was Shaw’s great contribution that he gave to Qnglish drama a
new life-force which it had lacked even in the hands of revivalists
like Arthur Henry Jones and Pinero, He created not only the
lew drama of the ZOth century, the drama of ideas and problems
lut also prepared the audience ready to accord a hearty welcome
to what the dramatists of the new age were intending to give to
the public. He revolutionised the whole concept of drama as it
was mpposed to he in the earlier ages and made it essentially a
medium of discussion and reform, rather than pure relaxation
and fan. It was Shaw’s great achievement that he gave the air
if seriousness and purposiveness* to drama without sacrificing the
element of fun and gaiety that the audience hungrily craved for.
He gave his philosophic pills a nice sugar coating of joyousness
and lun.

Shaw had begun his career as a dramatic critic quite in

* always have to preach. My plays all have a purpose’
(Bernard bhaw).

( 502 )

the style of William Afchef, but he failed to bring about the
ccgenesation that he sought to inttodiice in the field of dcama.
**Pioally, having foc three a half-years made mincemeat of the
sentimentalities and essential falsities that contemporary drama-
tists continued to ofFec to their convention- ridden audiences, and
seeing no sign of a regeneration, he abandoned criticism, and,
more from a sense of duty than vocation, set out to show that he
could do what he had upbraided Pinero and his school ot drama
foc not doing.”* Before turning seriously to dramatic pcoduccijn,
Shaw tried his hand at fiction and wrote five novels; fmmaturity
(1879), The Irrational Knot (1880), Love Amont^ the Artist
(1881), Cichei Byron’s Profession and the Unsocial Socialists
(1883), which failed to achieve the desired success. These were
regarded by Shaw as **rhe novels of my nonage” and their cold
reception damped his enthusiasm for further production of works
of fiction. He turned to dcama as his saviour and made it ihe
main forte of his literary career.

Why did Shaw write dramas ?

The failure of Shaw as a critic and as a novelist brought
him to the field of drama, which was best suited to his genius.
The subjective conflict constantly proceeding in the soul of Shaw
between, opposing elements, egoism and socialism, intellect and
instinct, reason and emotion, demanded an objective treatment
and for that purpose, drama was the best medium. He had to
create characters to express outwardly one or the other point ot
view that occurred to his mind. For this job the drama provides
him the suitable medium. He believed that the stage was the
finest instrument for the dissemination and discussion of ideas,
far superior to the school and the pulpit. Since Shaw had many
important things to say to his generation, he used the theatre as
the vehicle for his thoughts. He accepted the theatre as he found
it, and used it for the discussion of ideas teeming in bis mind.

) **His . love for debating, in which he had shown how irresis-
ttblt it was foif him to counter his . arguments himself if no one
else would, influenced him towards choosing the kind of pUy io
which the chataciers tijindertake the dual task of proposer and

*ol»yiiton Hudsop -.iThe^^Jwfntieth Century Drama.

( 503 )

ipposet/'* Sbav had at hcatt a bent fot satire. Passing through
iltnost exactly the same experiences as Dickens^ h< could not
x^rite a sympathetic study of the life of the London poor like
3avid Copperfield. But he could pen satires burning with indig-
latloD like the Widowers* Houses* Verse and comedy are the
wo instruments of the satirist. If Shaw had lived in the days of
\lcxander Pope and the Heroic Couplet he would have probably
written verse, but as he lived in the days of Oscar Wilde and tbc
epigrammatic stage, he wrote plays, particularly comedies. His
iatiric genius gave a tile to his dramatic an and made him a
comedian rather than a tragedian in dramatic literature. But
perhaps the predominating influence that urged Shaw to turn to
:he drama was the success of Ibsen, the Norwegian dramatist,
who seemed to Shaw a close parallel to his own genius.

Shaw— the dramatist of ideas.

Shaw had certain ideas to present to the public through the
medium oi his plays. *^He saw things as they are and had the
courage to tell in compromising language exactly what he saw.
He thought lor, himself, resolutely refused to accept ready-made
opinions, and judged solely on evidence or on logic. He set hts
mied free from prejudice, superstitions, illusions, a id popular
delusions,”** He bad his origin il thoughts on contemporary
problems as well as problems affecting humanity at large. He saw
things with direct vision and altogether apart from the prejudice
imposed by custom. He refused to be carried away by contempo-
rary emotions by which the general public was swept ofl' its feet.
He had powettul and penetrating ideas to offer on a variety of
subjects like slum landlordism, prostitution, natural Christianity,
husband bunting, professional delusions and impostures, marriage,
history, paradoxes of conventional society, questions of conscience,
Darwinian evolution and Life-force* He fervently and fearlessly
set forth his ideas in his dramas and hoped to convert the nation
to his way of thinking through the medium of his plays. t Each
drama of Shaw seeks to present his original ideas on the subject

Dr A S. Collins : English Literature of the 20th Century.

** J • W. Marriott : Modern Drama

t *1 write plays with the deliberate object of honverttng tiie nation
to my opinion*— Shaw.

( 504 )

treated by him. Foe example. The Widowers' Houses sets forth
his views on the subject ot sium^aod locdism and Afrs. Warren's
Profession on the subject of prostitution and bcoiheh. Candida
offers his views on marriage, Man and Superman on life-force and
husband hunting. Major Barhira on Christianity, MiW/iunce on
education. Arms and the Man on the subject of romantic love and
war and Apple Cart on monarchy and democracy.

Shaw a Satirtsit, Tconoclast, Propagandist and Reformer.

Shaw ^ras essentially a satirist, like Benjonson, and the
avowed object of his art as a dramatist »sls to break conventional
idols and fetishes and bring about healthy changes iu the body
politic of our society ridding it of the insidious cancers eating into
its vitals. Shaw never bothered about the glorification of art for
the sake of art. ^‘Shaw had no conception of the drama as a
literary art form in which the total pattern of meaning is achieved
cumulatively and completely by the language put in the mouth
of the characters as they talk to and interact with each other.*'
This is confirmed by his long and detailed stage directions, io
which not only the action of his characters but their states ot mind,
emotions, tone or voice, and intentions are fully described as
though in a novel. He never wrote for the mere glorification of
art. *'Art for art's sake is not enough. For art sake alone 1 would
not face the toil of writing a single sentence,” observed Shaw
in one of his writings, and true to his statement he never wrote
for the sake of arc but mainly for reforming the evils running
rampant in the society of his times. He suboriinated his literary
ability to a moral purpose. '*He became the Knight of the
Burning Pencil, a crusader whose appointed life-^wock was the
endeavour to restoie colour and light to England’s once green
and pleasant land.”* Through the mouth of Tanner in Han and
Superman Shaw made his position clear as an iconoclast and
reformer of the evils of our society. He staced through Tanner—
have become a reformer and like all reformers an iconoclast.
I no longer break cucumber frames and burn giass bushes. 1
shatter creeds and demolish idols.”

**The giants at which he tilts” says Scott James, ^*are

* A. C Wac4.vTwjeptieth Century Literature.

( 505 )

motal slavery, humbug, meutal sloth, social apathy, supec&tition,
seotimentaUsm, collective selfishness and all che static ideas which
have not been consciously sabjected to the tests of real li^ and
honest thought.*' He behaved like a mountebank in hi^ exposure
of bad housing, bad education, bad conditions of labour, bad
fxiotals, and other social evils which troubled him so deeply.
The objects of his satire include conventionalised religion and
philosophy in Androcles and the Lion and in Back to Melktiselah;
social attitude towards see relation^ in Mrs, Warren^ s Profession,
Candida and Man and Superman; military heroism in Arms and the
Man and The DeviPs Disciple and professional charity in Major
Barbara, Shaw was not satisfied with mere demolition of estab<
lished idols, but on the debcrs of the razed buildings, he sought
to build new buildings with open aii atmosphere. *'He is tbe
great destroyer of evil in out modern age, and out of his destruc’
tiveness he seeks to lead us toward a newer, fresher, and more
constructive thought/'f

Shaw remained a propagandist in favour of certain ideas
which he cherished in his mind. He made propaganda in favour
of certain ideals which he sought to realise in social life. But
this does not apply to all the plays of Shaw. In some of his plays
he is not at all a propagandist and a reformer. He has no arc to
grind in such plays as Fanny*s First Play and You Never Can Tell,
They are not at all concerned wJth propaganda. In these plays Shaw
gives himself entirely to the job of providing intelligent amuse-
ment. **He is not so much a dramatist, inspite of his propaganda,
as an artist who has dramatised propaganda itself."* **The Gadfly
who stung society to the quick went on stinging, and even in
extreme old age emerged from time to time to prick real or imagi-
nary foes. But he left behind no savour of bitterness for the young
as well as the 6ld. He was the cheering, zestful, great-hearted
veteran who loved the smell of the battle in the field of ideas,
who, with an exhilarating smile on his face, was still happy to
challenge and attack again

t Allardyce Nicoll : British Drama.

* J. W* Marriott : Modern Drama.

t^Scott James : Fifty Yean of English Literature

( 506 )

ShawS Plot Construction.

**Sfaaar’8 ideas can never cease to form an important part oi
his dramatic legacy. Nevertheless it is as a dramatist upon the
stage that Shaw demands primary consideration.”’*^ It is as a
dramatist that he has to be judged by his readers and the first
consideration in this direction is the examination of his plots
and his skill in plot construction.

Shakespeare had borrowed his plots from various sources,
but be had never sacrificed the «6tory for the sake of bis ideas.
Plot construction was well known to the great artist. A great
artist had the skill of a seasoned master in the manipulation of his
plots having several threads which stand in a harmonious pattern as
in The Merchant of Venice and A Mid Summer Night's Dream. But
Shaw, who is considered next to Shakespeare, paid little heed to the
story or the systematic development cf plot in his plays eschewing
irrelevancies from the dramatic point of view. In the Postscript to
Hack to Methuselah Shaw declared, *‘When I am writing a play
1 never invent a plot. I let the play write itself and shape itself,
which it always does even when up to the last moment I do not
forsee the way out. Sometimes I do not see what the play was
clriving'at until quite a long time after I have finished it.” The
plots of Shaw are loose, and the dramatist introduces scenes in his
plays which do not seem to have any vital link with the main
thread of the story. His stories ultimately dwindle into mere
situations and episodes. In bis later plays all sente of plot is lost
and the dramuist jutt starts talking with the readers. He comple-
tely dispentes with the need of a story. Getting Married and
Misalliance are little else but interesting talk. When the critics
complained that they were not plays at all but ^'dramatized
conversation,*' he retorted : play is anything which interests

an audience for two hours and a half on the stage of a theatre.’*
Absence of Action in Shaw’s Plays.

A dramatist who lays emphasis on talk and conversation in
his plays cannot be expected to give action the prominence it
deserves in drama. Action is wanting in many plays of Shaw, and
whatever action is present is smothered by the sallies of wit and

^ Dr. A. S. Collins : English Licefatuee of the ZOth Ceptovy^

( 507 )

bouts of intellectual swordsmanship. The want of actios is made
up by an extra dose of dramatic dialogue. “If the dramatic
dialogue is good enough*' says Joad, «what of the action ? There
is somethiog faintly vulgar about the alteration of position oi
matter in space which is, after all what action
Lack of Conflict in Shaw’s Plays.

Conflict, which has been adjudged by critics as the life-
breath of drama, is lacking in Shaw's plays. Instead of the
dramatic conflict the dramatist introduces mental conflict in his
plays. His importance lies in the fact that he transferred conflict
of modern drama from the physical to the mental plane. To quote
A. C. Ward, “A great deal of critical disapproval of Shaw’s plays
has been based upon the supposition that they lack the primary
element of conflict. If conflict in drama necessarily implies a clash
involving either violent physical action or intense emotional
disturbance, then conflict in that sense is often lacking in the
Shavian diama It is, however, intentionally lacking, and its place
is taken by mental action, which to Shaw is fax more exciting.
For the conflict of passion Shaw substitutes the conflict of thought
and belief or rather, he brings moral pissions to the stage rtv
break the long monopoly of physical and sensual passion.”’!^*
Shaw’s Characters

Shaw has enriched dramatic literature by creating a variety
of characters drawn from all classes of people in our society.

After Shakespeare no English dramatist equals Shaw in the variety
and vividness of his chaticters, though he lacks almost entirely
that interest in the individual person which is one of
Shakespeare's qualities.” The characters of Shaw are representa-^
tives of certain ideas which the dramatist seeks to propound
through them. Some of his characters are mere mouthpieces of
his theocies invented to supply a necessary contribution to an
argument while others are really projections of his own personality.
It is very nicely pointed out by Scott James, “that there was at
least one human character that he could depict to , the life, and
that was bis bwn. In half of his plays there is one human being
who is copied trom life and appears under different disguises, and

E, M. Joad : Bernard Shaw.

A. C. Ward ; Bernard Shaw

( 508 ) .

that is th^ iafinitcly various yet always the same George Bernard
Shaw.*'

If Shaw's characters are merely puppets standing for certain
ideas speaking their parts not as life but as Shaw's arguments
dictate, how they give the ait of verisimilitude, still less the
less, which the enjoyment of drama requires. This is a pertinent
question. Shaw's characters, inspite of being puppets and mouth
pieces of the dramatist have life in them because **hc is so witty,
because his stage craft is good; and especially because he has
prepared the minds of his audience by written prefaces to his plays
which are far more convincing than the plays themselves."

**His characterisation sometimes lacks the power of fully
convincing us, because it does not always ari$e from such imme-
diate creative insight as does the general idea of the play, but is
CO some extent dependent on that idea for the nature and variety
of its figures. But once started on their career, his people share
the vitality of the whole even when that is a vitality not of action
but of talk. They may, indeed, be carried away by the 2est of
the argument and talk too much like Shaw and not enough as
individuals, but this only enhances the unity of the play and its
dramatic effectiveness."*

Shaw, inspite of making his characters talking machines,
has been able to give some outstanding individual characters such
as Bluntschli, Father Keegan, Shotover and Saint Joan who^can
well be placed in the gallery of signal individual characters in
British drama. His Alfred Doolittle in Pygmalion, Tsinnet in Man
and Superman, Larry Doyle in John BulPs Other Island, Magnus
in Apple Cart are memorable addiiions to the national heritage.
Some characters of Shaw are intensely vital, and stand on theix
own right as mastecly creations of the great dramatist. Energy
Straker, Laza Dolittle, Rummy Micchens, and Brother Martin are
really great creations. We may not come across Shaw’s
characters in the streets and buses, in the cinema hall and the
public pub, but in their own world they are as Hive’ as the
characters of Dickens in their own world. Shaw's characters are
never mete dummies or conventional types. They are lively*

* Dr. A. S. Collins : English Literature of the 2pth Ccsitui^.

{ 509 )

vigorous and witty.

Shaw’s portfayal of women is masterly. Shaw invented the
modern woman before he discovered himself. ‘*Women, above
all, he read and presented with a cunning unromantic realism
which suggests that, like the novelist Richardson, he understood
women even better than men: to Saint Joan may be added among
his many j^^ividly realised women, Raina, Cleopatra,
Candida, Aon Whitefield, Major Barbara, Jennifer Dubedat and
Eliza Doolittle, to name only a few.” In the opinion of Harrison,
^‘Barring Candida and Lady Cicelv (Captain Brassbound’s
Conversion) Shaw’s women from Blanche, his heroine in PVidowers*
Houses to Vivie Warren in Mrs. Warren*s Profession^ are distinctly
unpleasant, practically unsexed women. Their bodies are as dry
and hard as their minds, and even where they run after men, as
in the case of Anne in Man and Superman^ the persuit has as
much sex appeal as a time table. Whether such women ever
existed is an open question.'’*

*‘Shaw’s men when they arc popular heroes, are often
pretentious weaklings. He pulls Shakespeare, Napoleon, and
('steser from their pedastals, and reveals them to us as human
beings with all the frailties of the flesh. He laughs at the athletic
type of socialist parson who, for all his popularity in the pulpit,
is really a great baby. He pokes fun at the foreign missionary.
He is amused by the Spanish bandit. He chuckles at the Prime
Mifkistei, the soldier, the aggressive Labour man and the devil.”t

In two directions Shaw’s characterisation had special aitrac-
tion and power. He successfully evoked the sympathies of the
readers in unattractive people like Mrs. Warren and Louis
Dubedat. He cleared with enthpsiasm characters of broad comedy
like those of Dickens such as Candida’s father Straker and Eliza’s
father Alfred Dolitile. In these humorous figures idiosyncracies
are emphasised to create pure fun.

There were no conventioaal heroes or villains in his plays.
Like the plays of Galsworthy, the dramas of Shaw hold the
audience the villatu. David Daicbes says, **Aod often the tea)

* G. B. Harrison : Bernard Shaw,
t J. W. Marriott : Modern Drama.

( 510 )

villain i$ not a character in the play, but the audience. For the
audience, the average playgoer represents that thoughtless compla-
cent, sentimental society which, for Shaw, was responsible for so
much distortion of vision and so much evil and suffering.”

Shaw’s Wit.

Shaw is the master of wit rather than emotion. He had
the devastating wit of an Irishman with the penetrating logic ot
a Frenchman. He distrusts emotion and never allows his characters
to run into emotional utterances emerging from the heart. His
appeal is more to the mind than to the heart, and his wit wins us
more than his emotional expressions occasionally slipping out
from the lips of his tragic characters like St. Joan. *'From the
days of Widowers* Houses Shaw's wit sparkles through his plays.
With Arms and the Man it began to have great prominence. Wit
is the very essence of Shavian comedy, in which the dramatist,
standing outside the world he creates, secs it with and impish
detachment.’**

Shaw is the master in the field of comedy writing. He
belongs to the great tradition in being a writer of comedy — often
the comedy of manners. To the existing types of comedy, such as
the Romiintic comedy of Shakespeare, the satirical comedy of
Ben Jonson, the comedy of manners, the comedy of Intrigue, the
sentimental comedy; and the comedy of humour, Shaw added the
‘^comedies of purposeful fun.” **His fun is something peculiar to
himself, an effervescing bubbling-op ctcrnilly youthful and joyous
exuberance of spirit. He is continually inverting ideas and poking
fun — poking fun at us, at his audiences, at his chacactecs, at ideas.
Over all Shaw has thrown the mantle of his peculiarly dominating
sense of fun, just as Shakespeare cast the radiance of his humour
alike on Dogberry and Claudio.”**

**Shaw’s comedy of ideas is full of life and fun; comedies
like Major Barbar i (1905), Andrades and the Lion (1913) and
Pygmalion (1913) are entertaining as well as critical and stimula*
ting; but all this comes from the sparkle of Shaw’s mind, and not
from a fully realised dramatic projection of a complex vision

* E. Albert ; A History of EngUsh Literature.

** A. NicoU : Bniish Drama.

( 511 )

on life/’*

Shawls Dialogue.

Shaw’s dialogues are bfilliant, flashy, sparkling and
Npontaneous. He is a master of dcamatic dialogue. Kis characters
are articulate and voluble in contrast to Galsworthy’s charactet^
and express themselves well in sharp and impre^'^sive dialogues,
“fie excels in brief, witty exchanges and, above all, in the hand-
ling of extremely long speeches when his characters put forward
their carefully reasoned arguments. He had the art of making the
long discourse as interesting and dramatic as action, and this was
something new to the stage. His brilliance in this has never been
surpassed.”** “Shaw has done as much as any man to revolutionize
stage dialogue. He has invented the dialogue ot disquisition, and
can make an argument as thrilling as a stand-up hght. When
people complain, as they sometimes do, that there is no action
in, say. Getting Married or Too True to be Good^ they forget that
intellectual action may be as dramatic as a battle. Thoughts can
hit like bullets, emotions can explode like shells, and a word duel
between a man and a woman can be more thrilling than throwing
chairs about the room/’f
Shaw’s Place io English Drama.

Shaw is undoubtedly a great dramatist. “It greatness con-
sists in being irreplaceable, Bernard Shaw’s greatness is assured.
It was not long before people began to talk about him as the
fmglish or Irish Moliere.or the Voltaire of the twentieth century,
and undoubtedly he combines in himself some of the qualities of
both these great men. Shaw’s name will not be forgotten as long
as their's are remembered, and what is best in his influence may
well become part of our common human heritage. J

The fact is that Shaw remained an entertainer and a
master of all the tricks of the entertainment trade and his wit and
intellectual brilliance were never fully absorbed into a dramatic
form of appropriate depth and scope. This is not to say that Shaw
was a great writer whose plays do not fit into, any accepted

* David Daiches^: ^ Critical History of English Literature.

** B. Albert : A History of English Literature,
t J. W. Marriott : Modern Drama,
i a Strauss : Bernard Shaw.

( 512 )

ctt^gocy* rathex that he was a dramatist of immense talent
and prodigious wit whose limited view of the natuxe of literary
art prevented him from seeing the limitations of his own artistic
imagination and so from seeking a dramatic form which could
contain all he had to say about men absorbed wholly into the
dramatic texture.'**

‘‘When all deductions are made, and when Shakespeare
has been put at the head of the roll of English dramatists^ who
is to be placed second it not Shaw ? Benjonson, Marlowe,
Congreve, Webster, Tourneur Sheridan ? The tailings of any one
of these are no fewer than those of Shaw, though they may be
different failings, their achievements seem less than his. Not one
of them directed and dominated the thought ot the seventeenth
and eighteenth century as Shaw directed and dominated the
thought of the early twentieth century in England ind beyond.
Not one of them was mixed by a blaze of moral passion, as Shaw
waSi Not one of them had a greater command of rhetoric or a
more briliianc wit. Some of them were great poets — as Shaw was
not ; yet which of them commanded a better prose style than
Shaw at bis best. Shaw’s place is undoubtedly next to
Shakespeare."**

Q. 114. Give your estimate of Granville Barker (1877--
1946) as a Dramatist and institute a comparl.son between Galsworthy
and Barker as Realists, in modern "drama.

Am. Granville Barker was one of the prominent
dramatists of the twentieth centui^, and he belonged to the
group of Realists who sought to discuss realistically the social,
political economic and industrial' problems of the twentieth
century. His plays are discussions of contemporary problems
and his themes include the marriage conventions, the inheritance
of tainted money, sex, and the position of woman He is very
serious in the presention of the social problems, and the note
of sobriety and seriousness imparts an air of heaviness to his
work. His characters well nourished at the feast of life and
ate life* like in the expression of their feelings.

, * David Daiches : A Critical History of E^ngUsb Literatuce*

♦* A. C. Ward— Twentieth Century Literature.

( 513 )

The main plays of Barker arc The Marrying of Am Leert
(1899), The Vosey Inheritance (1905), Waste^ (1907) and The
Madras House ( 1910). In The M drrying of Ann Leete Barker's
insistence is on the Life-Force theory propounded by Shaw. His
George and Ann Leete faithfully carry out the command ot
life force, and arc opposed to the shams and conventions ot
a tradition- ridden society. The Vosey fnherit once deals with the
problem of tainted money. Mr. Vosey, senior partner of a
respected and prosperous hrm of solicitors leaves plenty ot
money for his son Edward. Later on Edward comes to know
that thi money left behind by his father for him has been earned
dishonestly by cheating and deceiving the clients. Edward is
horrified at the prospect of inheriting this tainted money. He
prefers poverty and bankruptcy to the tainted money left behind
by his prosperous father. He is an idealist and an honest man
and his opposition to his inheritance is well marked out. The play
ends on a note of lofty idealism.

In Waste (1907) Barker deals with the problem of sex anta-
gonism, and in The Madras Home (1910) he concentrates on the
discussion of women in modern society. We are shown the picture
of a home in which there are six marriage-able girls living futile
lives unless some eligible bachelors or widowers take them ofl
their father’s hands. The play possess the problem of marriage
for women in aristocratic families.

Barker was a realist in the presentation of his problenis.
His characters and dialogues are natural, and he leaves the
impression of a serious dramatist of the twentieth century.

Barker and Galsworthy are both of the same kidney. ‘‘Both
hold strong views on the ihcmcs they chose to illustrate. Each
revolted temperamentally,— Barker against the repression of the
individual by the intimidation of Victorian convention, Galsworthy
against the crushing of the individual by society. Each had a
gospel to proclaim. Barker the doctrine of self-realization,
Galsworthy the doctrine of tolerance. And even if they couli
have achieved complete impartiality they were far too clevei
play-wrights to overlook the fact that to dispense with all emotion
is to eviscerate the drama. So, like every other instinctive drama-
tist, they concentrated on a certain aspect of life, and selected

( 514 )

incident and character. But they did try to reproduce this
microcosm on the stage with the utmost verisimilitude.*’’*^

Q. 115. Write a note on John Masefield (1878-— ) as a
Dramatist.

Ans. John Masefield is not only a great poet, but also a
great dramatist of the twentieth century. He has attempted a
variety of plays, and has made experiments in domestic plays,
historical drama, plays of supernaturalism and mysticism, and
poetic plays. His plays exhibit his versatile genius as a dramatist.
^‘Gifted with a high imagination, he is by spirit sternly classical;
endowded with passion, no man is more clear-sighted and
logical than he; full of the fantasy of the poetic genius, he
is a confirmed realist; clinging tensely to the natural world, he
is wrapped in the spirit of mysticism.'***

In the sphere of domestic tragedy and realistic portrayal
of life in a sombre vein, his The Tragedy of Nan stands on a
higher pedastal than other plays belonging to this class. The
story is one of unflinching realism, and pathetically presents
the tragedy of a poor woman named Nan, who finds herself hard
hit by tyrannical and callous social forces working against the
underdogs of society. A note of sympathy is well marked out
in the tragedy. It is more pathetic than heroic and seeks to win
the sympathy of readers for those unfortunate victims of society
who are repressed by cruel social laws. The other tragedies on
the same pattern are The Campden Wonder (1906), Mrs, Harrison
(1907). They arc both unrelieved bourgeois tragedies, but arc
without the spark that gave a moving appeal to the Tragedy
of Nan,

Among the plays of supernaturalism Melloney Hottspur
(1923) deserves a high place. The play deals with supernatural
forces Melloney Holtspour moves in the world of spirits after
her death, and leans like Rossetti’s blessed Damozel from
the bars of her spirit world giving blessings to her earthly
lover.

* Lynton Hudson — The Twentieth Century Drama.

A. Nicoll*— British Drama.

( 515 ,

Pompey the Great {1910) \s 2 L historical play presenting the
contrast between the idealism of Pomey and the realism
of Caesar.

Plays dealing with religion and mysticism are The Trial
of Jesus (1925) and The Coming of Christ (1928). These plays
are saturated with religious mysticism and symbolism.

The Faithful^ A King\s Daughter Good Friday arc roman tic-
cum-poetic plays and exhibit the other side of Masefield’s
genius.

Masefield is a dramatist essentially of the domestic
school and inspite of his diversified excursions will be recognised
in later years as a wiiter of domestic tragedies.

Q. 116. What is the significance of the work of Sir James
Barrie (ISM-' 1937) in modern drama?

Ans. Sir James Barrie was a prominent Scottish dramatist
and was gifted with all those qualities that go to make a succ-
essful playwright — constructive imagination, expert craftsman'
ship, a mastery over dialogue, a sense of character portrayal,
humour, pathos, and irony. The significance and importance
of the work of Sir James Barrie mainly lies in the fact that at
a time when drama was mainly occupied with themes of rea lism
and problems of social life in the hands ot Jones, Pinero, Barker
and Galsworthy, he had the courage to break away from the new
upsurge for naturalism and realism, and keep alive the claims of
romance, fancy, fantasy and light hearted humour tempered
with flashes of witticism. *‘He showed that naturalism was not
the only way, and gave a very timely reminder that a play must
do more than stimulate the brain; it must touch the heart.
In an age of growing cynicism he guarded the guttering flame of
romance and kept it fr >m being quenched intcllectualism.”^

Sir James Barrie kept studiously aloof from the world
of drab and sordid realities and exploited with determination
and professional assurance, the emotions, whimsies and sentimen-
talism implicit in the Scottish Kailyard tradition, and in so much,
Victorian and Edwardian middle class feeling. He was quaint

^ Lyntoo Hudson : The Twentieth Centufy Drama.

( 516 )

and whimsical in the presentation of romantic life. He was
inspired in his dramatic craftsmanship by a spirit which was
akin to his own Peter Pan, ‘an elusive spirit which preferred not
to grow in this modern world’.

The main works of Barrie, in which romance, fantasy,
whimsicality figure prominently are The Professor’s Love Story
(1894), The Little Minister (1902). Mary Rose (1902). Quality
Street (1902), Peter Pan (1904), Admirable Crichton (1902),
mat Ever) Woman Knows (1908), A Kiss for Cinderella (1916),
Otar Brutus (1917).

Except in the Admirable Crichton where Barrie tackles a
problem of social life, in all other plays there is a break from the
tradition which the playwrights were popularising in the Problem
Plays. In Peter Pan Barrie creates a world of fairy romance
appealing both to children and grown up persons. Peter Pan
lives in the world of day-dreams and creates for himself the
utopia of childhood. In Dear Brutus Barrie presents the
mischievous pranks played by Puck on a number of English
people who even in their old age seek to recapture the gaiety and
mirth of their youthful days. Rose Mary deals with a strange and
curious Hebridean legend about a girl who mysteriously vanishes
into space, lives for sometime in a strange world of fantasy, and
then comes back to live again her normal life in the midst of
people who receive her without any consternation. A Kiss for
Cinderella is the materialization of a dream in which the heroine
finds herself in the midst of royal banquets presided by a king and
a queen, seated on golden thrones.

Barrie was indeed “a skilled technician, who kept his head
in an age of experiments. At a time when advanced drama
threatened to degenerate into talk he never allowed his plots to
stand still. His episodes grow out of each other with refreshing
unexpectedness, yielding to crisp dialogue and contrasts of
character. With rate insight he discovers that the theatre goers
like himself, wanted the sincerity of childhood in an age of adult
affectations. So he showed them more intelligibly and sympa-
thetically than Proust. That is bis title to literature.”*

* Sherard Vines : A Hundred Years of English Literature.

( 517 )

Q. 117. Write a note on the achievements of Sir William
Gilbert (1836--1911) in modern drama.

Ans. William Gilbert was another great dramatist of the
twentieth c^otui^» who like Sir James Barrie, kept away from
the discussion of social problems which had been brought out
in their full glare by writers like Jones, Pinero, Galsworthy,
Barker and Shaw. Gilbert and Sullivan worked together in the
production of Sivoy operas marked with comical extravaganaa.
In the plays of Gilbert, such as Palace of Truth (1870), Broken
Hearts (1875), Tom Cobh (1875), Patience (1881), The Mikado
(1885)', there is plenty of whimsicality, and refined sense of
witticism and humour. “His main tendencies were cynical, witty
and satirical, with a decided leaning towards parody and buries*
que; but to these he added a strangely poetic fancy and a delicate
whimsical humour.*’^

Gilbert was intellectually a witty writer and paved the way
lor Oscar Wilde and his satiric thrusts. He had a brilliant wit and
used puns, quips, quibbles, epigrams and paradoxes in ample
measure in his works. His operas and plays are highly entertain*
mg. They are often thought of as delightful musical fantasies,
and their charm will not grow stale.

Q. 118. Write a note on the revival of the Comedy of
Manners during the twentieth century and evaluate the work of the
prominent comedy writers of this class.

Ans. During the twenties and thirties of the twentieth
century there was a revival of the comedy of manners which the
Restoration comedy writers like Ethercgc, Wycherley, Vanbrugh,
Farquhar and Congreve had perfected in their times. The
twentieth century revival of the comedy of manners is generally
free from the taints of obscenity and immorality which had
called upon the Restoration comedy the stern voice of condem-
nation at the bands of writers like Dr. Johnson and Macaulay.
The twentieth century comedy bears a close relation to the
Restoration comedy in its witticism and sparkling dialogues. The
comedy had its heyday for a period of three decades and began

^ A, Nicoll :| British Drama.

( 51 « )

to show signs of fatty degeneration after the second world war.
“It may return although it is doubtful whether the social
conditions of the period after 1945 arc as likely to encourage
the display of theatrical wit as were those of the intetbellum age;
and even the most cursory knowledge of the theatrical history
convinces us that for this kind of comedy to flourish the social
atmosphere must possess certain qualities which arc wanting m
our times. The comedy of manners is a tender plant and will
not bloom if cold winds are blowing.’’*

Among the comedy writers of the twentieth century whr
did yeoman’s service into the revival of comedy, the name oi
Bernard Shaw is certainly at the top. He was the pioneei
in this direction and he sought to invest modern comedy with the
same satiric vigour and reformative aim which it had enjoyed ai
the hands of Ben Jonson during the Elizabethan age. Shaw was
considerably influenced by Meredith’s view of the comic spirit
and made his comedies intellectually sharp and witty, aiming al
the time at exposure of the evils rampant in our times. Shaw’s
comedies inspite of their witticism and humour are serious in tone
and are instruments, not so much of entertainment, as edifleatior
and social reform Shaw is deadly in earnest in his comedies.
administers sugar coated pills. The readers enjoy the suga
coating leaving the bitter taste of the pills.

Oscar Wilde (1854—1900) was another great corned;
writer of our times, and though as witty as Shaw, he did not air
at reform or moral edification through his comedies. He was th
main reviver of the comedy of manners, and it was his ptimat
object to provide entertainment and artistic delight to his reader
through his comedies. Wilde was an apostle of the theory of At
for Art’s sake and was not inspired by Shaw’s crusading entht
siasm to harness art for social regeneration.

- The main characteristics of Wilde’s comedies are the
witticism and sparkling dialogues. Wilde did not care for cogei
plots. The plots of his comedies are melodramatic and reple
with hackneyed situations. They ate banal in their appeal. H
characters also ate little more than marionettes. But what mak<

A. Nicoll : British Drama.

( 519 )

V('ilde’s come iies entertaining and lovable is \X^ilde’s style; and
David D iches correctly hits the nail when he says that ^stylization
is the very raison d*etre of Wilde’s plays.’ He brought to the
theatre an acute and brilliant wit, while his care for style helped
to clear the drama of verbiage and to make its dialogue keen
edged and clean cut.

Wilde painted the picture of the elegant and refined upper
class society in his five famous plays particularly in Lady
lVindmere*s Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An
Ideal Husband (1894), The Importance of Bein^ Earnest (1895)
and Salome (1896). These comedies are comedies of manners
in the Sheridan tradition, aristocratic in their outlook, gay and
flippant in their tone, and sparkling and vivacious in their style.
Beautiful words and phrases flow out from Wilde’s pen and wc
hardly bother about the plot or the progress of the story.
“Indeed” says Marriott, “In all Wilde’s plays the dialogue frequen-
tly puts the story out of mind. We don’t care what happens
only if the characters will keep talking.”

Noel Coward is another great comedy writer of the twen-
tieth century. His comedies are lighter in vein and satirical in
content. “His unerring sense of theatrical effect, his wit and
dance of dialogue, his sparkling presentation of the hurly-burly
of bright young moderns and their disillusioned fantastic elders
delighted play goers in play after play.”* His* wit and flashes of
scintillating dialogues are well presented in his comedies parti-
cularly in The Red Tro;? (1924), The Vortex (1924), Fallen Angels
(1925), Easy Virtue (1926), Bitter Svieet (1929), Private Lives
(1930), Cavalcade (1931), Conversation Piece (1934), Tonight at
Eight Thirty (1936)^ Blithe Spirit (19^1), Present Laughter (1943),
and This Happy Breed (1943).

Somerset Maugham, the novelist, is also a comedy writer
of repute, and he seeks to represent the life which he has seen and
ki^own for a number af years in his life. All his comedies are
based on his observation of life. He believed ' that, “the founda-
tion of drama is actuality. It must be natural above all things,
and achieve the illusion of truth by reproducing the manners and

* Dr. K. S. Collins : English Literature of the 20th Century.

( 520 ,

customs of the day as the exigencies of the theatre permit.'
Maugham’s comedies successfully catch the manners and ways of
the upper class society. His comedies are better in plot construe
tion and characterisation than Wilde’s comedies, though he suiTci*^
in witticism as compared to his great compeer in the field oi
comedy. The main plays of Wilde ate 4 Man of Honour (1903).
Lady Foredrick (1907), Mrs^ Dot (1908), Jack Straw (1908), Home
and Beauty (1919), The Circle (1921), Our Betters (1917), Constant
Wife (1927).

Sutro carried the artificial comedy of manners forward by
producing a few plays : The Walls of Jericho (1940), The Two
Virtues (1941). His plays have a sparkle only a few degrees less
intense than Oscar Wilde’s.

James Bridie, a Scottish dramatist, produced a number ot
comedies marked with youthfulness, romance, and gaiety. His
plays are a peculiar mixture of argument, philosophy, violent
action and whimsical fancy. Inspite of certain structural weak-
ncss,* his comedies hold us in thrall, for he has several gifts as a
comedy writer which are well presented in his plays. His imagina-
tion, sharpness of intellect, and fine How of language come out in
all his plays. He is known to the readers by his John Knox,
Ti e Sleeping Clergymen and Balfry, The Anatomist,

Fredrick Londsdale popularised the comedy of manners
His comedies are satirical in content and flashy in dialogue. He
exhibits a technical skill in the handling of the dramatic material
at his disposal. His main plays are The Lost Mrs, Cheyney (1925)
and Spring Cleaning (1925).

The comedies of Ervine, j. B. Fagan, H. M. Harwood.
A. A. Milne are quite delightful. All these dramatists have made
notable contribution to the revival of comedy n. our times.

« **A play of Bridie gives the appearance of being unfinished* It
is more like a first draft, often in urgent need of seviston and
structural alteration.” (Fredrick t«amley).

( 521 )

Q. 119. Write a note on the Irish Literary Theatre or
the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, and give an account of the Irish
Dramatists who revolutionised the Irish Theatre Movement by their
dramas.

Ans. Irish dramatists have played an important part in
the history English drama. From the middle of the eighteenth
century down to the beginning of the twentieth, the chief addi-
tions to English drama were the work of Irishmen. Goldsmith,
Sheridan, Oscar Wilde, and Bernard Shaw were Irish drama-
tists, and their contribution to English drama is substantial.

During the twentieth century, there was a stir among
Irish dramatists to revive to old Irish drama and popularise
Irish themes and legends in dramatic works. With the object ot
putting Ireland distinctly on the map of British drama the
Irish National Literary Society was formed in Ireland by W. B.
Yeats and a few other leading Irish dramatists in 1892. This
society developed by 1903 into the Irish National Theatre
Society and in the same year The Abbey Theatre was established
with the aid of Miss A. E. F. Horniman, a rich English lady.
The Irish Literary Theatre had the avowed object of dramatising
Irish life; not the life of sordid realism but the Irish life of
beauty and enchantment, myths and legend. No doubt there was
among these dramatists a craze for the revival of Irish legends
and myths, but they could not completely ignore the life of pea-
sants and Irish country folk from their plays. There was,
therefore, in Irish Theatre Movement in Dublin a combination of
two motives. The first object of the dramatists was to revive old
Irish life, and theii second object was to give a new interpre-
tation to the life and achievements of Irish peasants. The sponsors
of this movement thus aimed at the revival of old Irish legends
and mythologies as well as create a new school of native comedy
centrirg round Irish folklore and representing Irish peasant
life and character. **That imaginative idealism which has always
characterized the Celtic races, that love of passibnate and dreamy
poetry, that only half-ashamed belief in the fairy world, all gave
a particular tone to the plays produced at the Abbey
theatre.”* '

* A. Nicoll : BrittolTDrama. *

( 522 )

The nfoaiinent dramatists of the Abbey Theatre Dublin
were W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, J. M. Synge, Lennox Robinson
T. C. Murray, Padric Column, Edward Martyn, O Casey and
Lord Dunsany* We will briefly deal with the works and achieve-
ments of these dramatists,

W. Yeats (1865—1939).

The work of W. B. Yeats as a dramatist belongs to the
Irish literary movement and the Abbey Theatre. Yeats was
primarily a poet and it is quite natural that his dramatic work
should have been imbued by the spirit of lyricism and poetic
fervour. The dramas of Yeats can be divided into two groups.
In the first group we can place plays dealing with Irish life in
a straight forward manner without any symbolism or mysticism.
These plays of this group arc The Countess Cathleen (1892),
The Land of Heart* s Desire (1894), The Shadowy PFo/err (1900),
Cathleen in Houlihan (1902), The King*s Threshold (1904), The
Hour Gla*s (1904), Deirdre (1907), /If the Hawk*s Well (1917)
and The Cat and the Moon (1926). In the second group we
place Yeats's mystical and philosophical plays like Cavalry (1920),
The Resurrection (1931), Purgatory (1939) and The Death of
Cuchlain The plays of this group are symbolic in charac-

ter. One needs some understanding and knowledge of Yeats’s
symbolic system to grasp them fully in all their niceties. These
symbolic plays have a haunting suggestiveness about them and
are highly stylized in a manner reminiscent of the Japanese *No
plays.’ The language is colloquial and ritualistic ; and the
presentation of thought is enigmatic.

W. B. Yeats has no doubt left a rich legacy in dramatic
held. Yet he did not have the gifts of a great dramatist. He
was a greater poet than a dramatist, and poetry dominates his
plays. There is little or no attempt at characterisation in his
plays, and his characters are his own mouthpieces giving
expression to his poetic ideas in a dignified manner. The plays
no doubt present a love for old Irish legends and folk, songs^
tales of supernaturalism, angels and demons, but they lack action
and sound characterisation. That is their weakness. They do not
create the *411usion of possible people behaving credibly and
esilig an appropriate speech medium.”

( 523 )

The popularity of Yeats’s plays, “depended mcie upon
poetic ehatm and strangeness than upon dramatic power.
Essentially a romantic lytic poet, he did not move with ease in
the dramatic form.”* In the opinion of A. Nicoll “Yeats may
be regarded rather as a lytic poet than as a playwright. His
delicately fragile melodies and his esoteric mysticism alike tend
(o weaken the theatrical element in his dramas.”

Lady Gregory (1859— 93t).

She is known as a comedy writer dealing with Irish life
and folk lore in a language that is characteristically Irish,
Though her dialogue may not be as remarkable as Synge’s, yet
there is a charm in her presentation of Irish characters. Her main
works are Irish Folk History Plays (1912), New Comedies (1913),
Seven Short Plays (1909), The White Cockade (1914), The
Caravans (1917), The Wonder Plays (1922), Three Last
Plays (1928).

Jahn Millington Synge (1871—1909).

J. M. Synge was the greatest dramatist in the rebirth oi
the Irish Theatre. He played an important part in giving to Irish
life both in its tragic and comic aspects, a tangible form and
shape in his plays. He studied life objectively in its beauty, its
comedy and its tragedy, and gave expression to his teelings in a
language that is poetical, rich and natural, “His plays are written
in prose, but they have rhythms and cadences of poetry springing
from the natural idiom of the peasant. This speech, rich in
natural music and full of vivid imagery, is increased in power by
its compression, and by the simplicity which is only achieved by
much revision. Synge's style has the vitality of the great
geoius."t

The main plays of Synge are The Shadow of Glen (1903),
Riders to the Sea (1904), The JikeFs Wedding, The Well of the
Saints (1907), The Playboy of the Western World and Dledre of the
Sorrows (1910).

The Shadow of the Glen is a comedy dehlingwith Irish
peasant life. It is based on an old folk tale representing the
faithlessness of an Irish woman to her husband. T** »#//«• »-

* A. C. Ward ; Twentiith Century Literature,
t B. Albert : A' History of English Literature.

( 524 )

the Sea is a pathetic and grim tragedy in one Act, and brings out
the life of the hsherfolk living in the west coast of Ireland in all
their emotional intensity. The sea takes a heavy toll oi life and
the old lady Maurya loses all her sons and husband in the sea.
Hers is a pathetic lot, and tears come out as we read this play.
The play has grand, stark simplicity and a controlled intensity of
feeling which are most impressive. The Welh of ihe ^aints is a
fantastic comedy, and The Playboy of the Western World excels
it in riotous fun and comic vitality. Round the character of the
play boy Christy Mahon, Synge builds “a riotously funny comedy,
full of spontaneous vitality, which gives an excellent, if
satirical picture of the Irish character.” The Playboy gives an
impressive representation of Irish peasant life and character and
is full of striking and beautiful phrases heard by the dramatist on
the roads from Kerry to Mayo. The Diedre of the Sorrows is
based on an old Irish legend in which themes of love and death
are tragically yet gloriously interwoven.

Lennox Robinson (1886 — ).

Lennox Robinson made a departure from the main trend
of Irish playwrights by presenting realistic themes instead of
making excursions into the world of Irish mythology and
legends. He is primarily the writer of comedies verging on farce
and caricature. His main plays are The Clancy Name (1908),
The Cross Roads (1909), Harvest (1910), Patriots (1912), The
Dreamers (1915)^ The Lost Leader ( i918). The Whiteheaded Boy
(1920), The Round Table (1924), Crabbed Youth and Age (1924).

T. C. Murray

In the plays of Murray, we have poignant studies of Irish
peasant life. His main works are The Wheel of Fortune (1909),
Birthright (1913), Maurice Harte (1912), Spring (1918), The Briery
Gap (1918), Aftermath (1921).

Padric Column

With Robinson and Murray, the contribution of Padric
Column should also be taken into accunt. **He took Irish
problems realistically and seriously but could see the humour too
of Irish characteristics even when deploring the way in which the
towns, by their attractions^ were emptying the Irish countryside
of "young people.” His main works are The Kingdom of Youth

( 525 )

(1902), The Land (1905), The Fiddler's Home (1907), Thomas
Musketry (1910).

“An air of imaginative beauty passes over the whole, so
that things spiritual and things material seem to meet in a
common harmony. At the same time Mr. Column^s work is not
by any means fanciful. His methods are at bottom as realistic as
are those of his two contemporaries mentioned above”*

Kdward Martyn.

He is an Irish playwright of the school of Synge. Unflinch-
ing realism is united with a vivid poetic imagination in his plays.
His main plays are The Heather Field (1899), Meavt (1900).
These plays are marked with the spirit of poetry and supernatu-
ralism though they are based on realistic setting.

“Martyn’s real strength is seen to lie in this strange union
of reality and of the supernatural. Few dramatists have succeeded
as he did in welding together into a complete whole these two
spheres. If he is mystically inclined in Hfeave, hc-sinks to sordid
actuality in Grangacolmun, If his supernatural atmosphere is
perfectly achieved in An Enchanted Sea^ it is somewhat vitiated
in the comic atmosphere of The Dream Physician (1940). No
other writer of this time, save perhaps Sir James Barrie, had
quite the same power of uniting these two contraries, although in
the works of Lord Dunsany, a “similar union, with a different
purpose, is masterly attained.”**

Lord Dunsany. (1878 — )

He is the Irish dramatist who has succeeded in producing
an atmosphere of awe, fear and supernaturalism in his plays. He
has separated himself from the school of Synge and Ycics in not
seeking to present Irish life, but the life of oriental lands. His
main works are The Glittering Gate (1909), The Gods of the
Mountain A Night at an Inn (1916), The Queen's Enemies

(1916), The Laughter of the Gods (1919), If (1921).

“OuQsany does not belong to any school of drama. He
has created a kind of play which deals with the most fantastic in
a style which exactly suits them-a highly imaginative prose which
produces the effect of poetry. He has extraordinary inventiveness

* A. Nicoll I British Drama.

**Ibid

( 526 )

lA ofiental nomeoclatore, and his litetaty style is escelleiit» being
inspired by Bunyan and the Bible. He carely attempts long plays.
Ha has probably found, like Mr. Sladen-Smith who seems to be
the only other playwright to attempt fantasy in this vein, that
the short play is the best medium for his peculiar kind of
theme."*

O’Casey (1884— )

O’Casey was a worthy successor of Synge. He presented
Irish life, not the Irish life of the Aran Islands, but the life of
slums of Dublin bringing out all the sordidness and drunkenness of
the Irish men and women. *‘His background, however, was not
the Aran Islands but the slums of Dublin, crowded noisy
tenements where women quarrelled and loafers drank and the
tragic violence of civil war was ever at hand."**

O’Casey’s first play The Shadow of a Gunman brings out
the slum tenements of Dublin in their crowded squalor. It reveals
the bloodiness of the Anglo-Irish war of 1920. This play was
produced at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in 1923. The next play
Juno and the Paycock was produced in 1924. It is a political
play dealing with the execution of a youngman by his Republican
comrades who suspected him of treachery. The Plough of Stars
(1926) also deals with the cruel and brutal folly of civil war. The
Silver Tasie combines the naturalistic and expressionistic methods,
and the skill with which the diamatist allows the one to drift into
the other is really praiseworthy. *‘ln the war scenes of The
Silver Tassie, O’Casey tried to communicate the soldier’s reaction
to the blood and sweat of war in a way that conveyed the
universality of the experience. For this purpose he adopted a
mixture of chanted verse and styliaed prose put into the mouths
of nameless chofuses of soldiers wounded stretcher bearers.*’t
The other plays of O’Casey Within the Gates (1933), The Star
Turns Red (1940)j Purple Dust (1940), Red Rose, for Me (1946),
Oak Leaves and Lavender Cockadoodle Dandy (1949) do

oot have the same intensity as bis first three plays though the
magic of language still gives them their enlivening touch.

*^J. Marriott :Modem Drama.

** A. S. Collins . English Literature of the 20th .

f Lynton Hudson : The 20th Century Drama.

( 52 ^ ^

The plays of O’Casey ate abdut Irish life and the tragedy
tad comedy of this life is well brought out iu dialogaes, which
ire vivid, racy and chythmical. In O’Casey comedy and tragedy
ill cheek by jowl. ‘‘Comedy is seldom long absent, yet one can
never forget the grim, underlying sadness. He draws what he sees
with a ruthless objectivity and an impressionistic vividness of
detail.”

“The characters of O’Casey are weak, they are crude and
pitiable. They are comic creatures speaking a rich lingo of the
Dublin slums. They strut about, boasting, singing, quarrelling,
drinking with unflagging vitality.”

Q. 120 Give a brief account of the Provincial Repertory
Theatre and the Manchester School of Dramatists in our times.

Ans. The Provincial Repertory Theatre in England like the
Abbey Theatre, Dublin, owed much of its success to the efforts of
Miss Horniman (1860 — 1937) who out of sheer disgust for the
Dublin performances started a repertory theatre of her own at
Manchester in 1907 which she ironically named the Gaiety
Theatre. It was here that the dramatists of the Manchester
School of drama, headed by Miss Horniman, got the proper
opportunity for the exhibition of their dramatic skill. The main
dramatists of the Manchester School of drama are Stanley
Houghton, St. John Hankin and St. John Eevine. These drama*
tists of the Manchester School intended to produce intellectual
drama ; but failed to come up to their expectations. Instead of
the iotellectual drama we have the drama of the industrial life
of Manchester. The dramatists of the Manchester Repertory
Theatre sought to produce realistic problem plays in the new
tradition. “Choosing generally -i background of the iodustcial
or business world, these playwrights dramatised stories which
iihowed rebellious youth striving against repressive parents, the
clash of man and master, the stupidity of convention, the need*
less unhappiness caused by difFerence of social class, and the
emergence of . bold independent womanhood/’’*^ In the dramas
produced by the dramatists of the Manchester .School we have a

Dr. A. S. Collins — English Literature of the 20th Century.

( 528 )

cleat a ad photographic picture of the social environmeot and
iodustiial life of the people of Manchester. The young drama-
tists of the Repertory Theatre were considerably in the grip o(
the life they knew intimately. These young repertory piaywrights-
Hughton, Hankin and Ervine, ‘‘tended to restrict their interests
to the narrow held of man’s relationship to his social enviion
ment ; they limited his horizon to four walls of the suburban
parlour where the glass gaseliers, the innumerable China orna
ments, the antimacassars and wax fruit were symbolical of the
outmoded shibboleths of middle, class morality.”’'^

“The repertory movement was not only an attempt to free
the theatre from the dictatorship of the financier and the actor-
manager ; it was also inspired by definite theories of dramatic
act. (1) The ‘long-run* system was regarded as injurious to both
the play and the players, since it led to a mechanical style of
acting that deadened the mind of the player and made him a
machine instead of a sensitive instrument ; the result being a coar-
sened interpretation of the play. (2) The repertory system was
based upon the team principle. There were no permanent ‘stars'
among the actors : the Hamlet of one performance might be a
second murderer in the next. (3) Under the old system, theatre
managers ‘called in’ scene-painters, costumiers, composers, light-
ing experts, and others, to carry out certain separated pieces of
work. The repertory system created a corporate art of the
theatre — an organic whole, not a casual assemblage of disunited
parts. (4) Most important of all for dramatic literature was the
fact that repertory directors recognized that a play might attract
only comparatively small audiences. Under former conditions
such a play had practically no chance of production, since, if
any profit could be expected from it. But in the repertory thea-
tres a few pertormances of a play with a limited appeal were
balanced financially by the production of plays of a more
popular type.”**

The most successful repertory experiment in London was
that conducted at the Court Theatre from 1904 to 1907 by J. E. ‘
Vedrenne and Granville Barker ; Vedrenne as the man of affairs

* Lynton Hudson— The 20th Century Drama.

** A. C. Ward— Twentieth Century Literature.

< 529 )

Bfttlcet the maa of the theatre. During that Court season thirty-
two plays (new and old, native and foreign) were staged. The
outstanding feature was the unanticipated popularity of Bernard
Shaw. Eleven of his plays were produced, and these abcounted
for 701 performances out of a total of 958 during the season. The
Vcdrcnne-Bitker programme included, also, plays by Granville
Barker himself (TAf Voysey Inheritance), John Galsworthy (TAe
Silver Box), Ibsen, Euripides (in Gilbert Murray’s translations).
Maeterlinck, John Masefield, St. John Hankin, and others. Much
that is best in contemporary drama came from the Court Theatre
season.”* Let us -briefly examine the work of the Manchester
playwrights.

Granville Barker (1877—1946)

Barker, whose work has been discussed separately in
another question was a dramatist who contributed a lot to the
Repertory Theatre. He began his career by producing three
Shakespearian plays— ^4 Winter’s Tale, A Midsummer Night’s
Dream, and Twelfth Night in an original manner. Through his
plays the audience heard for the first time Shakespeare as he
should have been heard.

In later years Barker produced realistic-cum-idealistic
plays, the chief of them being Marrying of Ann Leete (1899),
The Voysey Inheritance (1905), Waste (1907) and The Madras
House (1911).

Stanley Houghton (1881—1913).

Stanley was a writer of comedies and his fame as a
dramatist is based on The Dear Departed (1908), The Muster of
the House (1910), Fancy Free (1911); The Younger Generation
(1910) and Hindle Wakes (1912). In these plays he deals with
the revolt of youth against established authority. He paints
the pictures with realism though not in such hard colours as
Miss Baker’s plays.

St. John Hankin (1869—1909).

Hankin, who died in 1909, is known by his The Two Mt.
Witherboys (1903), The Return of the Prodigal (1905), The Cassilis
Engagement (1907) and The Last of the De Mullins (1908).

* A. C. Ward— Twentieth Century Literature.

( 530 )

Hadkio, like most of bis contemporaries was a dramatist of ideas.
His plays throw considerable light upon the society of his age.
His understanding of human nature was in the mass and hence he
failed to probe the heart of his individual characters. He lacked
emotional fervour and sympathetic outlook of Galsworthy His
cynicism comes out prominently in his plays. “In general, we may
say that all of Hankin’s plays, well constructed as they arc in the
main, lack naturalism, and his stage figures, seem to us rather
invented than felt.”* *‘His plays lack both wit and the sense
of life.”t

St. John Ervine ( 1883 — )

Eevine will be remembered by his Mixed Marriage (1911)
and Jane Clegg (1913), John Ferguson (1915), The First Mrs.
Fraser (1929), Robert* s Wife (1937). He is recognised as the
greatest of the Manchester or repertory dramatists. His method
is strictly realistic, and like Houghton he loves to deal with the
hard conventions of a narrow society. He gives expression to
the class war and the narrow prejudices of a convention ridden
society. In his plays there is conflict between the settled views
of middle age and the predatory instincts of the young. The
dramatist glorified middle age at the expense of youth. His plays
would ha’^e “carried more conviction if it had been made clearer
that youth, even when most self-seeking has a point of view that
should in fairness be ably and fully expressed in any play in
which youth is a chief protagonist.” **rhc greatness of Mr.
Eivine^s work lies in his creation of stern and dignified characters.
Few of his contemporaiies can equal him in this.”**

Allan Monkhouse (1858—1936).

Monkhouse produced a few plays of real charm. Among
his plays the pride of place has to be given to Mar} Broome,
(19H), The Education of Ur. Surrage (1912), The Grand
Cham*s Diamond (1924) and First Blood (1926).

After Dublin and Manchester, Birmingham produced a
repertory dramatist of wide fame. John Drici^watcr (1882^1927)
produced his plays at the Brimiogham theatre. A study of bis

* A. Nicoll — ^British Drama.

t David Daicbes— A Critical History of English Lwi^ture*
Nicoll— British Drama«

( 5Jl )

plays will be made separately later on.

**The repertory drama did much to popularise the dramas
of ideas. It also helped to create a new school of naturalistic
acting, which, while it was excellently adapted to the crook plays
and pert comedies of the twenties has impoverishei the theatre by
its inabilitv to give the natural reticence of life the necessary
expressiveness of art.”*

Q. 121. ^‘Perhaps the most hopeful and promising of all
movements in the English stage of tO'day is the rapid development
of the historical play.” (4 Nicoll) In the light of this remark
evaluate the work of the historical dramatists of the 20th Century.

Ans. The Historical drama of the 20th Century is of
great significance and importance in the dramatic literature of the
modern age. In the words of (UifFord Bax, the celebrated histori-
cal dramatist of our times, “The historical dramatist stands, in
relatioii to the playwright of modern life, somewhat as a portrait
painter does in relation to a photograph. He gives or tries to
give the essentials of human emotion and experience, not an exact
tendering of somebody’s actual speech but an impression of what
somebody is feeling.” The historical dramatist is a little different
from the dramatists of realism and naturalism, and it appears
to be his effort, “to escape from the tcammels of naturalism and
to bring back something of poetic expression to the theatre.”

Among the dramatists who popularised historical plays the
name of Bernard Shaw should certainly be placed at the top. He
wrote Coesar and Cleopatra and St- Joan and blaxed the track for
others to follow. John Ervine sought to bring Shakespeare’s
characters back to life in his historical plays particularly in The
Lady of Belmont (1924).

It was John Driukwater (1882—1937) who really made a
solid contribution to historical drama by his four plays Abraham
Lbtcoln (1918), Mary Stuart (1921— 22), O/fver Cromwell {1911)
and Robert E. Lee (1923). lo each one of' these plays them is a
central dominating personality standing heads and shoulders over
the multiplicity ' of individually delineated character^. These

* Lynton Hudson— The Twentieth Century Drama.

< 532 )

historical plays of Diiokwatec arc not merely chronicle plays
focussing all attention on events and external happenings, but
plays of ideas, presenting problems of human life in a dramatic
form. In Abraham Lincoln the problem set forth is whether a
hero like Lincolo should pursue his ideals with unflinching
determination or yield to external pressure and give up war for
ensuring peace. Oliver Cromwell and Robert Lee “subordinate
the presentation of history to a formal problem and in Mary
Stuart we have a subtle study of moral, social question, that of
woman’s or of a woman’s soul.” Mary Queen ‘ of Scots stands
for a woman who seeks to find all fine qualities of character in
one single lover. Her ideal is very high and it is difficult to
realise it in life. The tragedy of Mary Stuart is, in fact, the
tragedy of idealism and lofty ambition.

Clifford Bax (1886 -).

He is the author of several historical plays such as Mr,
Pepys (1926), Socrates (1930), The Venetian (1931), The Immortal
Lady (1931) and The Rose without a Thorn (1932). Socrates
lacks action but it clearly unfolds the Socracic method of discu-
ssion. This play is philosophic in tone and is ^chastely poetic in
form.’ The Venetian is lyrical and stands poles apart from
Socrates. The Rose without a Thorn is his best play. Here
neither we have the exuberant lyricism of the Venetian nor the
philosophical intensity of Socrates. In this play the ^author has
set himself to develop characters within a pattern, based on
historical fact, but shaped by his imagination. This play is a^sur
edly one of the most important and beautifully constructed
historical dramas of our times.”* In the matured opinion of
Allardyce Nicoll, “Mr. Bax is one of those dramatists of this
generation whose plays will live. His effective treatment of
character, his skilful wielding of material, and his delicate sense
of style give prime distinction to hts work.”

Ashley Duke (1885— ) ^

He is known for his historical play The Man with a Load
of Mischief (\9U), It is not exactly a historical play, but the word
historical **t8 used to include costume plays of any kind and is not

^ A. Nicoll : British Drama.

( 533 )

restricted merely to dramas in which historical figures arc the
chief characters.” What signalises The Man with a Load of
its beautiful prose style, and ‘the delicately polished
and jewelled prose dialogiie’ in which it has been presented for
the delight oi the readers. The story in this play is not at all
significant What attracts us is the style of the author. The same
stylistic beauties are to be found in his other plays- F/vc plays of
Other Times. One More River (1927) is a light comedy in a light
blank verse. He is a craftsman and a stvlist, described as ‘elegant'
by The Morning Post.

Rudolf Besier (1878—1942).

In his Barrets of Wimpole Street Besier recreated the
Victorian atmosphere with great fidelity choosing for his charac-
ters the poet Robert Browning and his love with Elizabeth Barret
Browning. “In Besier’s study of poetic passion and strange
perverted iniinct the plot develops in melodramatic form, with
frail heroine in villain’s power and noble hero prepared to over-
come all obstacles in order to win her love.” Biographical fact
is here a little more strained and certainly more emotionalized
than in The Lady with the Lamp.

Among the other historical dramatists of the age mention
is well deserved for the works of Shane Leslie who brought out
The Delightful, Diverting and Devotional Ploy of Mrs. Fitzherbert
(1928), Miss Joan Temple who in Charles and Mary {19^0) deals
with the life of the two figures of literature- Lamb and hi’ sister
Mary; Conal O Riordan who produced His Majestfs Pleasure
dealing with the period of Henri IV ; Edward Thomson who wrote
the Indian legend of Krishna Kumar i (1924); Howard Peacey
who won recognition by his Warren Hastings (1928), El Dorado
(1925) and The Fifth of November (1924) ; G. D Gribbe who
signalised his career by writing The Masque oj Venice (1924)
“which, although not historical is, sufficiently removed from the
ordinary life around us to partake of the impression which it is
the aim of the historical dramatists to produce.” tutton Vane
who wrote Outward Bound (1923) and Laurence Housmaa who

* A. Nicoll— British Drama.

( 534 ■ )

prodoced Possession (1921), God Bless Her (1922), The Comforter
(1922) and Victoria Regina (1935).

Q. 122. Write an essay on the Poetic Drama and dramatists
of the twentieth century.

Ans . In the catly years of the twentieth century poetic
drama could not gain much ground for most of the dramatists
of this period like Barker, Galsworthy, Shaw, were more interested
in the presentation of the social and economic problems of their
times in a realistic manner than in making excursions to a land of
poetic enchantment in their poetic plays. The drama in their
hands ceased to be the representation of ^emotional reality’ and
became a handmaid of social criticism. The use of flowery
language in realistic plays was out of place, and drama, dealing
with social problems, was prosaic rather than poetic in the early
decades of the twentieth century.

A change was noticed with the passage of time, and the
dramatists wh j followed the early realists, were fascinated by the
glamour and enchanting loveliness of poetic plays, and T. S. Eliot
prepared the ground for them by stating that 'the craving for
poetic drama is permanent in human nature’. Eliot emphasised
the ability of poetic drama to capture the elusive in life and
make it delightful and interesting. Twentieth century poetic
drama has assumed different forms and shapes in the hands of
different dramatists. Poetic dramas have been written on a
variety of subjects. Some plays have been written on the glorifi*
cation and exaltation of religion and the church, while a good
many of them have atheism and denunciation of God and priests
as their subjects. Some poetic plays are symbolic and mystical
in character and quite a large number of them have Celtic
mythology and Irish life as their subjects. Some plays have
oriental grandeur and arc inspired by oriental setting and splen-
dour, while others have aesthetic enjoyment and glorification of
sex-urge as their main spring. Thus we have a wide variety of
poetical plays is the twentieth century and a large number of
dramatists have preferred this art form to realistic or natqrAU^tic
.plays.

( 535 )

St€ph6o Phillipfl (1864-^1915) was among the eatliest o£
the poetical dramatists of the modern age. He produced five
poetical plays between 1900 and 1908. His main works are
Herod, Ulysses, Nero, Faust and Paolo apd Francesca, Phillips
tried to revive the old Elizabethan traditions in poetic drama.
Ernest Reyonolds in Modern Poetic Drama has denoiinced
Phillips for his decadent love for the old Elizabethan themes. In
his opinion, “all that, Phillips really did was to make the dying
bones of pseudo Elizabethanism into a slightly more hollow rattle
than Tennyson had done in Queen Mary,*' This criticism against
Phillips has some validity when it is applied to Herod, and
other plays, but it does cot at all apply to Paolo and Francesca,
which has been praised and applauded for its poetic bcautv
and bewitching charm. Even that confirmed antagonist ot pjetic
drama, William Archer, paid rich tribute to Phillips in the
Daily Chronicle when he wrote about this play —“A thing of
exquisite poetic form yet tingling from first to last with intense
dramatic life Mr. Phillips has achieved the impossible/* Thus
Phillips cannot be summarily dismissed as a simple imitator
of Elizabethan rattle. Though he sought to reintroduce the old
Elizabethan force and fire by the sonority of verse, )ct his poetic
plays failed to make much impression.

Oscar Wilde waved a new spurt to poetic drama by making
it symbolic and aesthetic in characters. His claim as a
writer of poetic drama has to be recognized particularly by
his two plays Salome and The Duchess of Padua, Though
Wilde had written comedies in prose, such as The Impor*
tance of Being Earnest and A Woman of No Importance, yet the
play which Wilde himself considered ‘a poetic, dramatic master-
piece,’ IS the controversial Salome, It is a symbolic play and here
Wilde unconsciously worked against naturalist concepts. The
play, in its language and atmosphere, is essentially anti-naturalist
and being anti-naturalist is the first step towards a poetical play.
The Princess Salome has been represented as a queen of beauty
and Tctrarch is fascinated by her ravishing chacma and looks at
her with ‘his mole’s eyes under his shaking eyelids/ The play is
quite successful and has a distinctive place of its own in the
poetic drama of the present age. In The Duchess of Padua, Wilde

( 536 I

marched a step ahead and advanced further in his technique
against naturalism. The Duchess of Padua is a curious^combina-
tion of Elizabethan and his own aesthete's outlook and the entire
work is in blank verse. The theme is the usual Italianate subject
of murder, usurpation and revenge. Wilde successfivlly started
the reaction against naturalism and paved the way^for symbolism.
Between Wilde’s Salome and the Abbey- dramati8lcs» the main
technique tried out has been ^symbolism’. It reached its culmi-
nating point in the hands of William Butler Yeats.

Davidson was another great dramatist who enriched poetic
drama by his The Theatocrat and Mammon Trilogy. The impot^
tance of Davidson in the history of 20th century poetic
drama lies in the fact that instead of concerting his poetic muse
to the service of religion and devotion to God, Davidson turned
the scales upside down and tried to build a poetic theatre on non-
Christian, anti-religious and materialistic presupposition.
Davidson developed his fascination for matter, and denounced
dogmas and principles of the Church. He felt a repulsion towards
religion, and glorified the individual and sex impulses.

The modern poetic drama had considerably been influen-
ced by the Orient, and in James Elroy Flecker vye have an
exhibition oi the oriental splendour and magnificence in modern
poetic plays. Fieckei’s Hassan is an oriental play remarkable
for all the splendour and majesty with which the East is associated.
Hassan is the product of a Romanticist, and seeks to capture
the spirit that pervadied the Eastern Countries. Hassan is an
oriental fantasy, sparkling with wit and richly visual
imagery of the east. Another romantic dramatist influenced
by the oriental theatre was Dr. Gordon Bottomley. *Io his youth,
he was an ardent admirer of Rossetti in whom he found
The lost Italian vision^ the passionate
Vitality oj art more rich than life.

More real than the day*s reality.

Later he rejected the misty world of symbolic shapes
and wrote a number of plays in imitation of the poetic spirit
of Shakespeare. He was ope of the pioneers in modern English
choric drama. His Culbin Sands is a remarkable play and
has a place of its own in the revival of romanticism in modem

( 537 )

dtama. ^

John Masefield, the poet lauteate, made cteditable contri-
bution to poetic drama by writing attractive religious plays:
Good Friday^ The Trial of Jesus^ Easter : A Play for Singers and
A Play of St. George. These religious plays ace most interesting
in view of the treatment of the well-known theme of the trial
and crucification of Christ. The realism which Maseheld
intfoduced in poetry is conspicuous by its absence in his poetic
plays and they seek to establish the tradition of iaith in modern
drama against the Nihilism of Davidson. Maseheld’s poetic
plays have beauty as well as romanticism in them. He is
emotional and exuberant, and there is something childlike and
unsophisticated in his attitude towards the emotional states of
human life.

Laurence Bioyon sought to revive the old Greek world of
romance and loveliness in his poetic plays particularly in Paris
and Oenone. In this work Binyon goes back to the ancient
world of Homer and revives the lore of Helen^ Paris and Oenone.
His importance in modern poetic drama lies in introducing
the old classicism in modern plays particularly in its theme.

Binyon’s most ambitious poetic play is Ayuli (1924). It is
a three-^Act play, representing the love of an Eastern king for a
beautiful lady, Ayuli, for whose sake he sacrifices his kingdom.
The king is the ^dorcr of Ayuli's beauty. “The love of the
king for Ayuli is not treated as an infatuation bringing a
kingdom to ruin, but as an attempt to set up beauty as the
ruling principle of life.” Binyon, the classicist, was at heart
a Romanticist, as can be seen from his study of Ayuli.

John Drinkwater (1082—1937) who shpt into immortality
hf his great play Abraham Lincoln written in prose, made all
possible efforts for the revival of poetic drama in the 20th
century. He lamented the evil days on which poetic drama hid
fallen, and in his four plays, Tne St *rm (1915), The God of
Quite (1916), (1917) and Cophetua (1922), he established

the supremacy of Poetical plays over prose comedies. Of these
plays The Storm and X^O arc very popular. The Storm deals
with country life. It presents the suspense of a wife about the
fate of her husband who is lost in the storm. The play has a

( 538 )

certain dignity of idea and of exptbasion^ hut it is tneditatiye
rather than dramatic in its structure. X=^0 or A Night of Trojan
War is concerned with the horrors of war, and the entire play is
an exposure of the evils of war. The poetic plays of Drink water
have a place of their own in modern poetic drama. He established
the form of poetic drama on a surer footing than other dramatists
of our time.

The con cribution of the Irish movement, also known as
Celtic revival, is remarkable to the cause of Poetic Drama in
our times. Its great leaders, W. B. Yeats, and S. M. Synge
'^deprecated the conversion of the theatre into the lecture plat-
form and the pulpit by realistic playwrights.** These dramatists
sought to poetise drama both in its thought content as well
as expression. Yeats made experiments in Distance for poetic
drama and tried to establish the lyrical drama as a serious
rival to the realistic drama in its heyday. He deprecated ihe
conversion of the theatre into the lecture platform and the pulpit
by realistic play vrights. He rejected the superficialities of the
modern period and sought continuously to retire into a world ot
mystic symbols through which he might be able to have a glimpse
of a reality, not subject to change and decay.

He determined to build up his own system of symbols and
evolved almost a personal mythology. He made experiments in
symbolism, presentation of self and anti-self, and almost deve-
loped an esoteric system which only those who were conversant
with his ideas about soul, thought, image, body, could possibly
understand. His main plays arc — The Countess Cathieen^ The
Land of HearTs Desire, In these plays Yeats devoted his
genius to the creation of symbolic drama i with lyrical
spontaneity.

In 1920 Yeats published Four Plays of Dancers and with
them he entered a new threshold of dramatic possibility. In them
he revives the use of masks and employs the technique of the
Japanese. The plays are wholly unlike the conventional British
plays; the playwright’s eastern inspiration rushes through them
like a great wind blowing out of the waste and lying all flat before
plays Yeats gave a new lease of life to national myths
and legends and poetised primitive human emotions. Being at heart

( 539 )

a poet, Yeats ptesented in lyrical Tctse the emotions of his chatac*
tets, though in laying stcess on emotional ezptession, he missed
in giving to the stoty its flavoui of romanticism. Yeats, boweyet,
succeeded in impacting lyricism and symbolism to poetic dtama
of the twentieth century.

Another Irish>man who made considerable contribution to mo-
detn poetic drama was J IVI Synge who had already achieved great
fame by his Riders to the Sea, a prose play. Later on he produced
The Plo} boy of the Western World and The Shadow of the Glen,
and in these two plays he ptesented the world of nature and
outdoor life in the best way possible. Synge had a sure dramatic
instinct and a keen insight into the motives of human nature. He
had also the gift of touching the chords of out heart by his
stirring words steeped in pathos. He had the gift of transmuting
pathos and ugliness into poetry and beauty, and his plays ate rich
in presenting pathetic thoughts in poetic language. Yeats and
Synge have become names as remarkable for modern ‘poetic’
dtama, as Marlowe and Kyd for the Elizabethan stage.

T. S. Eliot.

The poet who was largely responsible for a new orientation

in England towards verse drama and for its rebirth is T. S Eliot.

In a seminar at Delhi in 1963, Professor Daiches under-rated
the genius of T. S. Eliot by calling him ‘A great minor poet of
the 20th century.’ He might be a minor poet in poetry, but
certainly the is a major force in the poetic dtama of the 20th
century. The poetical plays which have come since 1935—
Murder in the Cathedral (1935). Family Reunion (1939), Cocktail
Party ( 1949 ) add Confidential Clerk (1953), and even the latest
still unpublished. The Elder Statesman, show him to have moved
away, from even ecclesiastical tradition to a deep ritualistic
pagan faith. The success achieved by Eliot in Murder in the
Cathedral, shook of the prejudice of critics against verse drama.
The spiritual note ringing throughout this play and the poetic
choruses and their mystical words, have won for the play a
name in the world of poetic irama. In this poetic play we have
dramatic intensity combined with poetic inspiration, and the
work has been acclaimed as a great success on the stage. “In
Murder in the Cathedral Eliot admirably fulfilled his own

( 540 ;

demands for poetic drama. The ciiicf of these was that the
poetry should be a subtle regulator of mo6d, and here
Eliot succeeds fully. The poetry is the life blood of the
play : the ideas, which are, in the miin abstract, are given
dramatic life purely by Eliot’s concrete and vivid images. It h
the highest tribute to a poetic drama to say, as one can of
Murder in the Cethedral, that is both intensely dramatic and
inconceivable in prose

Some shortcomings of the play should be frankly admitted.
Sr Thomas A. Becket strikes us lacking in depth. He appears
more a symbol than a person. The other characters in the play
do not seem to have an independent significance. They seem to
be personifications “of various simple abstract attitudes meaning-
ful only in relation to St. Thomas himselt.” The real ‘action’ of
the play docs not lie in the violent killing of St. Thomas, as it
should have lain, but rather in his confrontation with and his
victory over the various temptations, of which the most serious
and dangerous is undoubtedly the temptation to accept his
martyrdom. “The drama, in so far as there is a drama, is thu*^
strictly “interior” and the outward value of the play is rather
that of spectacle and a commemorative ritual.”**

the eminent success achieved by Eliot in Murder in the
Cathedral led him to write another poetic drama The Family
Reunion, which though keeping something of the murder clement
is much different from the religious theme of the murder in the
Cathedral. Eliot regarded it “as a drama of contemporary people-
speaking contemporary language.” It deals with the problem of
sin and its expiation. The setting is one of English aristocratic
country-house, and the scenes are the familiar drawrooms of
naturalism. The persons of the play include several “every day
insignificant” characters such as Ibsen used to have in his plays.
The theme or the plot takes it cue from the Furies who pursued
Orestes and never let him have the rest till he had committed the
crime. ' This theme of the Furies pursuing Orestes has been
transferred to an upper class country house called Wishwood in
the wind-and-rain swept countryside of the north o^ England. The

* Bamber Casciogne : Twentieth Century Drama.

** Frazer : The Modern Writer and his World.

( 541 )

theme of the Eumenides of Aeschylus works ill in its English
setting, and fails to satisfy the readers. *^The Family Reunion^*
says A. C. Ward, ‘*is an example of material pressed into an alien
mould, and showing>up of the fallacy that poetic drama could he
forced into existence/’

The third play fh^ Cocktail Party was produced ten years
after The Pimily Reunion. It is a simpler play. Here is a play
having minimum of imagery and evocation. There is no symbo-
lism in the play. The language in this homely play is, homely.
The verse is of the surface, although not ^ superficial. Statements
made by characters are conscious, lucid statements without anv
vagueness. The play could have been written in prose, but
verse form has been ^maintained because it imposes its control
at a level which is often below conscious observation. If we
try to alter almost any line in the play, the charm of the play
is affected.

The Cocktail Party has been described a ‘comedy’, but in
fact it is only in an ironical sense that it can be taken as a
comedy. ‘*It is the most depressing play, concerned as it is with
the breakdown of a sick society and an individual’s inability to
seek a way out of the super-civilized maze without calling on ihe
as dsiance of the nearest psychiatrist,” The play opens with a
Cocktail party which is a failure from the beginning. Edward and
his wife Lavioia arc at cross purposes and arc not happy.
However they arc brought to a state of reconciliation by Dr.
Henry Harcourt Reilly, who points out to the estranged pair that
conjugal happiness depends on adjustments rather ihan on
adamant views. They agree, and ultimately lead a good life.
They begin to understand each other and are happy. But the
doctor is nbt able to bring round Miss Celia Coplestone who also
suffers from loneliness, bhe had been the mistress of Edward
once, but now she feels alienated. The doctor advises her to
marry some one and lead a happy life. Loneliness for a woman
is suicidal. Celia does not listen to the doctor’s advice. She
remains all lonely brooding over her discomfitures. Edward and
Lavinta give Cocktail parties, but poos Celia is left with no aest
CO join them. She reaches the end of her terrible destiny, which
was none other than crucifixion. Joining a religious order she

< 542 )

is sent to * fax oT land where there is a native tebellion. She n
crucified. Her body is eaten by ants. Such is the martyrdom of
Celia Copieston. It is a depressing and grim play.

The play is based on the idea of atonement and is in the
tradition of certain Catholic conceptions, but it cannot be accepted
on aesthetic grounds in the play. The Cocktail Party accentuates
the inhumanity of despair and makes a tragic reading. It is not
a real comedy, but a tragic play.

The next play The Confidential Clerk (1953) is again a
pessimistic and depressing play. *'One has the feeling that Eliot
has attempted to make his characters of flesh and blood, and yet
has failed to make us identify ourselves with these characters who
remain strangely aloof. The last traces of poetry disappear and
Eliot has carried **the machine he set in motion,'" with The
Family Reunion^ when he wished to bring poetry to terms with a
contemporary theme — to its logical conclusion.’'

The play does not have an imposing theme. It does not
deal with matters relating to life and death, but merely with our
choice of what we want to do in the world. Sic Claude
Nfulhammer wanted to be a potter. He became a fiist rate power
in the city. Colby is his son. He appoints him as his ^confidential
clerk’, but the young boy is not satisfied with the job of being
a clerk. He decides in favour of being a church organist. His
choice is for the job of a musician , He makes a safe choice ior
his happiness. He is not like Celia of Cocktail Party who prefers
ctuciflxion to a happy life. The dramatist applauds Colby for his
realistic, though unadventurous decision to be an organist, a
second rate musician. The play illustrates the truth of the remark,
*4f you haven’t the sirengtb to impose your own terms upon life,
you must accept the terms it offers you.”

The Elder Statesman (1958) directs our attention to an elder
Statesman in his retired life. He had been a distinguished states-
man in active life. He had been honoured and applauded in bis
role as a statesman. The elder statesman is now on his death bed.
He **see8 for the first time the reflection of his. true self, of a life
spent avoiding reality and the sense of guilt which comes ; irom
moral cowardice.” This play is simpler in conception and tmftt
human in treatment^ ^ .

( 543 )

T. S. Eliot is a oame to coa|a£e with ta 'modeco dtatna*
lie has dealt ^vich religious, secular, and psychological themes in
his plays in a poetic style, varying his verse according to che theme
ot plays. **Eliot cannot be said to have solved all the pcoblems
which arose from the decay of romantic drama and from the limi-
tation of Che naturalist drama which he replaced. But he has perhaps
brought us to a point at which such a solution can be envisaged.
It is a very considerable achievement, whatever the immediate
iuture of the drama may be ; and in its nature it is beyond the
mode of praise.’*

Somewhat in the same mood that impelled T. S. Eliot to
write The Family Reunion and other plays, W. H. Auden and
Christopher lsherwood*’^bave collaborated to write plays. Their
joint plays are Vhe Dog Beneath the Skin or Where Is Francis ?
(1935), The Ascent o/F6 (1936) and On the Frontier (1938). The
first play The Dog Beneath the Skin has a mythical theme and
reads like an oli story in modern context. In Ascent af P. 6 there
is a mythical atmosphere, and it is here that one notes ihe
conscious creation of a myth out oi contemporary elements.
These dramatises have raised social issues to a mythological
plane.

**Tbese plays betray no neo-classical earmark beyond
the choruses; but exhale a neo-comantic perfume of the strange
and the remjtc The Dog Beneath the Skin is particularly rich
io symbolic imagery, characterbation, stage direction, scene, and
quotation. Photographically realistic incidents are blended
with improbabilities into a total design.” There is social propa-
ganda in them with a left wing bias. These three plays reflect
the disillusiooment and despair of man in the face of the stark
realities of life. The technique in these plays is borrowed from
the Gerinan expressionists. They are blunt in their satire and
have lost their appeal. Of the plays, The Ascent of F^6 is
the most acceptable because of its appealing thciM. It presents
the British iBxpeditioa sent by the Govecoment to hoist the
imperial banner over a mountain marked F. 6.

Steven Spender ta the moat' renowned comipunistic play-
wright of modern poetical play a* He is a Icftiat, and io his

( 544 )

poetic play The Trial of a Judge (written for Rupert Doone’s
Group Theatre 1938), he is definitely a 'popular front Conununiit.'
The theme is a powerful representation of the fate. of
Liberals and Communists in the hands of Hitler’s Nassism, He
represents the frustrating condition which produced Nazism in
Germany.

Sean O’ Casey introduced poignant expressionism in his
plays. His early plays: Show of Gunman^ Juno and the Paycock and
Plough and the Stars have themes thrilling enough to be poetic.
Their theme is the ^^common slum-dweJ let's heroism in the face of
the daily hardships of existence.”

During the period of the Second World War there was a
remarkable progress in poetic drama. Immediately after the
war a Poet’s Theatre was established in London. Norman
Nicholson’s The Old man of the Mountain had a successful run
and was appreciated for its Biblical setting and nice represen-
•tation of the story of Elijah and Ahab.

Christopher Fry was the only modern metaphysical verse
dramatist who introduced the theme of philosophy in his plays.
He has shown that modern verse drama need not be confined to
the presentation of tragic and religious themes. In Fry’s Ladfs
not jor Burning (1949) poetic drama achieves another milestone.
The play deals with the life of a young girl who is condemned
to be burned at the stake for she is convicted of witch
craft. The period of the play is the fifteenth century when
there was a general belief in witches and their malevolent influence
on human life. A young man offers himself for the lady and says
chat the lady’s not foe burning. The girl does not accept the
young man’s sacrifice and persuades him to live rather than immo-
late himself for her sake. The appearance of the lag-man whom
the girl was supposed to have turned into a dog saves the
situation. The lady is pardoned and the tragedy is averted.
The verse is loose* but sudden flights of poetry sown in the
midst of pedestrian passages. Fry advocated verse as an appro-
priate medium of philosophy because it directly amakes an appeal
to our intuition.^ **Fry’s plays are not so much an achievement

* Bambcr Gasciogne : T iventictb Century Drama.

( 545 )

in poetic dcama, as an ociginal application of vecse to familiat
theatrical ends. Mr. Pry’s work, that is to say, is not really a
part of the revived tradition of poetic drama. It is to be related,
not so much to the poetic drama of Yeats and Eliot, as to
particular tradition of Comedy in which in our own country,
the most successful practitioners have been writers in prose.*’*
Pry’s verse plays are creations of mood and have a wonderful
resplendence of language. What strikes one first in the plays
of Pry is his completely idiosyncratic style and his felicity for
words. His language has a dazzle which seems to be almost an
end in itself and is nearly blinding when striving to ignore it, an
attempt is made to understand the essential Fry.”**

Fry’s work has been adjudged differently by different
critics. A. C. Ward is of the opinion that ‘‘Christopher Fry
brought light and air as well as music and warmth into the
frigid charnel-house of contemporary verse drama. ’’f Quite
opposite to Ward’s view is Raymond Williams’s opinion who says,
“There is a definite place in modern English drama for Mr. Fry’s
comedies, but, in the resonance of his success, it is important
to emphasise that this place is neither innovating nor directive.”:]:
The truth seems to be with Raymond Williams and we whole
heartedly endorse his judgment.

In modern poetical plays, myths, religion, politics, modern
life, have been well represented. Radio programmes arc giving
further impetus to poetical plays. The future of poetical plays
is bright. If we survey the history of the last half Century of
English verse drama, we cannot say that a rich poetic harvest has
been garnered every year. In no period did art grow in geomc*
trical progression. Its growth is slow and steady and the past
achievement in this direction should fill us with faith and
hope for the future, for it is faith that creates and hope that
sustains.

No doubt, the main curcent of the theatre will flow in
what Galsworthy has termed, “the broad and clear-cut channel

* Raymond Williams : Drami from Ibsen to Eliot.

*♦ Fredrick Lumley : Trends in 20th Century Drama,
t A. C. Ward : Twentieth Century Literature.

:]; Raymond Williams : Drama From Ibsen to Eliot.

( 546 )

of natufalism.’* *‘But there will always remain a twisting and
delicious stream which will bear on its breast new barks of poetry,
shaped, it may be, like prose, but a prose incarnating through
its fantasy, and symbolism all the deeper aspirations, yearnings,
doubts and mysterious strivings of the human spirit.”* **We may
foresee, then, not only the continuance of a drama in verse, but
also the growth of a poetic drama in prose—- a prose either subtly
suggestive, like that of Maeterlinck, or else beautiful picture-
sque and expressive like that of Synge and the lesser Irish
dramatists.”**

Q. 123. Write a note on Expressionism in modern drama
and evaluate the work of the dramatists belonging to the«
^Expressionistic School.’

Ans. Disgusted with the overtone of realism in drama,
and the expression of the external life of sordid realities, certain
dramatists in America, Europe and England made new experiments
in producing plays not dealing with external realism but with the
inner life of the characters. Expressionism in drama is jast an
experiment in presenting the inner life of the characters in a
psychological way. *‘In the theatre it means a subjective instead
of an objective projection of the characters. In an ordinary play
they reveal themselves by what they do or say. Expressionism
endeavours to project the inner working of the mind.”t

^^Expressionist drama was concerned not with society but
with man. It aimed to offer, subjective psychological analysis, not
so much of an individual as of a type, and made much of the
subconscious. For such a study established dramatic forms and
methods of expressionius threw overboard conventional structure
in favour of an unrestricted freedom. Their dialogue was often
cryptic and patterned, now verse, now prose, and was in every
way as fax removed from the naturalistic prose of the realistic
school as can well be imagined. Symbolic figures, embodiments
of inner, secret impulses were introduced on the stage in the

* John Galsworthy : Some Platitudes about Drama.

** Chandler : Aspects of Modem Drama.

Lynton Hudson : Twentieth Century Drama*

( 547 )

attempt to make clear the psychological complexitcs of
character.”* “Expressionism was an all-out onslaught against
any sense of values in Germany. It has been described as an
exigency of the mind, a mixture of ecstasy and obscurity, both
facets being peculiar to the German temperament, and let us
admit it, language. No wonder and thank goodness, it has never
been assimilated neat by others.”*^^ The prominent dramatists of
the ‘Expressionistic SchooP in England and America are G’Casey,
Priestley, Munro, O’Neill, Rube Gstein an Elmer Rice. It
should be noted that ‘expressionistic drama* has not been very
popular in England and extreme forms of expressionism were
rarely practised and handled by British dramatists. We will briefly
deal with the works of these dramatist of the ‘Expressionistic
School.’

Sean O’Casey (i884— )

O’Casey, the Irish dramatist, is a worthy successor of Synge,
and is interested in the presentation of Irish life, not the Irish life
of the Aran Islands, but the life of slums of Dublin bringing out all
the sordidness and drunkenness of the Irish men and women. “His
background, however, was not the Aran Islands but the slums of
Dublin, crowded noisy tenements where women quarrelled and
loafers drank, and the tragic violence of civil war was ever at
hand.” t

O’Casey’s first play The Shadow of a Gunman brings out
the slum tenements of Dublin in their crowded squalor. It reveals
the bloodiness of the Anglo Irish war of 1920. This pUy was
produced at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in 1923. The next play
Juno and the Paycock was produced in 1924. It is a political play
dealing with the execution of a youngman by his Republican
comrades who suspected him of ticachery. The Plough and the
Stars (1926) also deals with the cruel and brutal folly of civil war.
The Silver Tvssie combines the naturalistic and expressionistic
methods, and the skill with which the dramatist allows the one to
drift into the other is really praise- worthy. “In the war scenes of
The Silver Tassie, O’Casey tried to communicate the soldier ’s

* E. Albert : A History ot English Literature.

Fredrick Lumley : Trends in Twentieth Century Drama,
t Dr. A. S. Collins ; English Literature of the 20th Century.

( 548 )

reaction to the blood and sweat of war in a way that conveyed the
universality of the experience. For this purpose he adopted a
mixture of chanted verse and stylized prose put into the mouths of
nameless choruses of soldiers, wounded stretcher-bearers.”

The other plays of O’Casey, Within the Gates (1933), The
Star Turns Red (1940), Purple Dust (1940), Red Rose for me (1946),
Oak Leaves and Lavender (1946), Cockadoodle Dandy (1949) do
not have the same intensity as his first three plays though the
magic of language still gives them their enlivening touch.

The plays of O’Casey are about Irish life and the tragedy
and comedy of this life is well brought out in dialogues, which are
vivid, racy and rhythmical. In O’Casey comedy and tragedy sit
cheek by jowl. **Comedy is seldom long absent, yet one can never
forget the grim, underlying sadness. He draws what he sees with a
ruthless objectivity and an impressionistic vividness of detail.”

The characters of O’Casey are weak. They arc crude and
pitiable. They are *comic creatures speaking a rich lingo of the
Dublin slums. They strut about, boasting, singing, quarrelling,
drinking with an unfiigging vitality.”

What kind of life is presented by O’ Casey ? His, pictures
are realistic and he tells us convincingly that in a civil war it is
the poor people of the country who suffer. “Few writers have so
intimately fused realism and pathos, tragedy and comedy, for his
world is a basically comic one whose atmosphere is a sky laden
with fate ever ready to strike almost at random and therefore it
is a most pitiable world.”**

C K. Munro (1889- )

C. K. Munro tried to imitate the German expressionism in
his play Rumour (1924). It deals with the origin of war and
modern international jealousies. It is a significant play of the
expression is tic school.

Reginald Berkeley. (1890—1935)

Berkeley’s play The White Chateau (1927) is in the style of
Munro’s Rumour. It does not have the intensity and bitterness of
The Silver Tassie, but it too has, power, dignity and distinction.
His other plays are The Quest of Elizabeth^ Mango Island^ The

* Lynton Hudson : The 20ch Century Drama.

** Dr. A. S. Collins ; Bnglish Literature of the 20tb Century*

( 549 )

World's End.

H. F. Rubinstein (1891—)

Rubinstein made experiments in the style and manner o(
Hctkclcy. ^His famous play The House (1926) deals with a building
having vi1^^il entity and power. “Perhaps the greatest weakness of
this play lies in the fact that a theme akin to those that informed
the old problem dramas has been dealt with in a style distinctly
‘modern’ and that consetjuently there is a disharmony between the
subject and its treatment. Mr. Rubinstein* however, is an interes-
ting pioneer, and in this play {The House) as well as in IsabeTs
Eleven (1927) be is obviously endeavouring to express something
new in dramitic form."*

J. B. Priestley (1894—)

‘‘Priestley is a playwright who has attempted to break out
of the conventions of the naturalistic drama, tending sometimes
towards a modified form of expressionism, at other times breaking
up the illusion of the box- realism deliberately as an Ever Since
Paradise.

He is the author of more than thirty plays. He commands
a wide range. He has produced comedy, farce, domestic drama
and expressionistic plays. His famous expressionistic play is
Johnson over Jordan. It reads like a morality play. The other
plays of Priestley are Time and the Conways (1937), Dangerous
Corner (1932), Music At Night (1938), T have B^en Here Before
(1937), Laburnum Grove (1933), The Long Mirror (1940), They
Came to a City (1943), Desert Highway (1943), Home is
Tomorrow (1948).

“Priestley the ardent reformer, and Priestley the plain mao
both appear in his dramas. His typically Yorkshire humour is part
of the almost aggressive ‘bon bommie’ of much of his work. His
characters ace soundly drawn, the dialogue is pungent, and his
plays ace always good theatre. His chief lack is the poetic insight,
which alone can make the greatest drama out of the metaphysical
problems that engaged his mind in his experimental work."
eimer Rice (1892-)

This American dramatist produced Adding Machine in 1923.

A. Nicoll : British Drama.

( 550 ;

It is considered a fine play of the expressionistic school and is a
nice 'experiment in expressionism.’

Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953)

O’Neill is a famous American dramatist of international
fame. He began as a Kealist in Anna Christie (1922) dealing with
the redemption of a prostitute, but soon came out of the realistic
fold. Since then he has made experiments in new techniques of
presentation, new dramatic forms and origin il dialogue. He has
a spark of genius and his experiments in style, and expression are
sometimes too bold to be easily followed by the audience. He is a
serious dramatist dealing with serious subjects like religion,
philosophy and scientific thought. He is the greatest exponent of
the expressionist drama ih the English language. His dramas ate
lengthy and sometimes obscure and confusing. But "he is a
dramatist of immense force and powerful imagination, and his
best plays show a genuine sense of the theatre.” His main plays
arc. The Emperor Jones (1920), Beyond the Horizon (1920), The
Hairy Ape (1922), Desire Under the Elms (1924), All God's^
Chillun Got Wings (1924), The Great God Brown (1926), Lazarus
Laughed (1927), Ah ! Wilderness (1933), Days without End
(1934).

"O’Neill was perhaps the only really protessiooal play-
wright who in his erratic trials and errors has covered the whole
arthtic field up to existentialism, displaying promising competence
and talent.

Q. 124 Give a brief account of the development of Drama
from 1939 to 1963.

Ans. "The history of drama since 1939 is largely the study
of the effect on the theatre of the 1939 — 45 War. The immediate
result of the imposition of the *black-out’ was a complete
closing of London theatres for some time and gloomy forebodings
about the future of the drama; but there were good things which
emerged. At no time during the Second World War did theatre
become so completely dominated by the frivolous gaiety of 'leave
entertainment’ as in the 1914— 18 War. It was as though the
immediacy of the struggle, in the bombings and blitzes, pt/^yqsited
the worst excesses of the 'leave spirit’. Light entertamment there

( 551 )

was in plenty, in review and comedy, but its popularity never
completely submerged the interest in more serious drama.
Moreover, a great step forward was made in the taking of good
drama into the provinces, into the smallest villages, and wherever
iirmy camps and hostels for workers brought the companies
^ponsored C, E. M. A. (Council for the Encouragement of Music
and the Arts), E. N. S. A. (Entertainments National Service
Association). The touring companies of these two organizations
brought live theatre to untold thousands who had never before
encountered it. In so d )ing. they created a vast new public on
which the post-war dramatist has been able to rely; a public was
responsible for the boom which immediately followed the war.

“Out period ov^es much to the work of four organizations,
which have not only done much pioneer w irk among new
audiences, but have contributed materially to the standard ot
dramatic production ac all levels. In additional to C. E. M. A.
(which was later to become The Arts Council of Oreat Britain),
and E. N, S. A., The British Drama League (founded 1919) went
on from strength to strength during the War and post-Wat >ears
and of the value of a thriving dramatic tradition to the health
and well-being of the professional theatre can be no question —
while on the professional stage the War saw an enormous
advance in the prestige of the Old Vic Theatre Company, with
its training school and children’s theatre company, the Young
Vic. Not must we omit the high place in public e&teem which has
been gained by the annual Shakespeare Festivals at the Memorial
Theatre, Stratford-on-Avon."

To the work of C. E. M. A and the Old Vic is largely due
the marked rise in the arcistic standards of play production which
has been a feature of post-War drama. The general level of acting
in major professional productions is very high, while, in subtlety
and aesthetic taste, staging and the general techniques of produc-
tion have improved enormously. Great and gifted actors have been
numerous, the names of Sir John Gielgud, Sir Lawrence Olivier,
Sir Ralph Richardson, Dame Edith Evans, and Dame Sybil
Thorndike leap at once to mind.

'*lt is, indeed, as an age of great actors and memorable
productions, of the classics (and particularly of Shakespeare) that

( 552 )

this decade will be remeinbefed* New dramatists of stature to
compare with Shaw, Syuge, or even Galsworthy, have oot as yet
been forch-coming. Sean* O'Casey has continued to write, but
though he had some success with Red R^ses for Me (1946) it is
doubtful whether such plays as The Star Turns Red (1940), Purple
Dust (1945), and Oak Leaves and Lavender (1947) have added
much to his reputation. The prolific J. B. Priestley still draws his
audiences, and James Bridie went on writing till his death in 1951
with unfailing versatility and inventiveness.”

** Among the new names none is as yet numbered among
the great. Four stand out among the younger generation : Peter
Ustinov (1921—), author ot The House of Regrets (1940), Blow
Your Own Trumpet (1941), The Banbury Nose (1944), The Man
behind the Statue (1945), The Indifferent Shepherd (1948), The Man
in the Raincoat (1949), and The Love of Four Colonels (1951);
Terence Rattigan (1911—), who has had great success with
French without Te^irs (1936), Flare Path (1942), While the Sun Shines
(1944), Love in Idleness (1944), The Winslow Boy (1946), The Bro-
wning Version (1948), and Adventure Story (1949); Denis Johnston
(1901 — ) who followed the notable The Moon in the Yellow River
(193i) with Weep for The Cyclops (1946); and Emlyn Williams
(1905 — ), actor, and author ot a number of successful plays,
among them the earlier The Corn is Green (1938), and more
recently. The Wind of Heaven (1945) and Tresspass (1947).”

*^Yet none of these four seems to wish to create a new
tradition, to give the drama the new sense of direction and purpose
which it now needs, for the realist tradition of problem and
discussion has gradually exhausted itself. Al the moment experi-
ments in a ne^ direction arc almost exclusively in the poetic
drama, for the re-establishment of which T. S. Eliot did so much
in the thirties. Since 1939 he has produced The Family Reunion
(1939), The Cocktail Party (1949), and The Confidential Clerk
(1953), and though they have not been as successful as Murder in
the Cathedral (1935), The Cocktail Party^ originally staged at the
Edinburgh Festival, made a great stir A rising dramatist, master
of vivid and telling verse drama, and one of the brightest scars in
the universe of contemporary drama is Christopher Fry (1907^)
whose work illustrates the new vitality pf the poetic niedmm. His

( 553 )

plays include The Boy withM Cart (1939), A Phoenix too Frequent
(1946), 7%e fiVj/inrn (1946), The Lady's Not For Burning (1949)
Thor With Angels (1949), Venus Observed (1950) and A Sleep of
Prisoners (1951). Other dramatists in the poetic tradition
include Ronaild Ducan (1914), author of the very successful This
Way to the Tomb ! (1945); Norman Nicholson (1914—), who wrote
The Old Man of the Mountains (1946), and Peter Yates, (1914—)^
author of The Assassin (1946), and The Burning Mask (1948)

*^Although the theatrical boom of the middle forties has
undoubtedly passed with the growth of financial stringency, the
impression of the post-1939 stage will remain as one of a vitality
which should ultimately convert the present lack of direction into
a new and living dcamatic tradition.”’^

♦ E. Albert : A History of English Literature.

20th Centurs^ Poetrjr

(1880—1966)

Q. 125. Write an essay on the main tendencies in modern
English Poetry.

Ans. **When the twentieth century opened’' writes A. C.
Ward, ^‘Tennyson had been dead nine years, and there was a wide
spread impression that English poetry had died with him.” To the
critics of the early 20th century it seemed that the glorious
days of the £n£ ‘sh poetic muse were over and what was to follow
was going to bs puerile, wayward, and obscure. A. C. Ward came
out with the remark, *'Tbe poetry of the period shows a distinct
decline, not in the general level of execution but in genius and
breadth of range.” The apprehensions of the critics of modern
poetry were rather misplaced, and modern poetry has to give a rich
harvest of poetic thought in a style and diction peculiar to the age.
The fact is that in the modern age there **ha$ been no dearth of
great poets or great poems that will stand the test of time and
become a part of the imperishable literary heritage of England.”
Astounding Variety of Themes in Modern Poetry.

Poetry to-day can be written on almost any subject. The
modern poet finds inspiration from railway trains, tramcars,
telephone, the snake charmer and things of commonplace interest.
Modern poets have not accepted the theory of great subjects for
poetic composition. The whole universe is the modern poet’s
experience. He writes on themes of real life and also makes
excursion in the world of religion, mysticism and fairyland. We
have a wide variety of poems such as The Song of Train by John
Davidson, Goods Train at Night by Kenneth Ashley; as The Charcoal
Burner by Edmund Gosse, Machine Guns by Richard Aldington,
"Seekers by Masefield and Listeners by Walter Dela Mare.

In their moods also, modern poets aae varied and do not
belong to a single recognisable group. *'Mr« Bridges is the poet of -

( 555 )

nine o’clock ia the moining, Mt. Hatdy of midatgbt. The truth In
there has oevei been a greater variety of moods among poets than
doting the past two generations.”*

Humanitarian and Democratic Note in Modern Poetry.

Modern poetry is marked with a note of humanitarianism
and democratic feeling. The modern poet, more than Wordsworth,
is interested in the life of labourers, toilers and workers in the
held. He perceives in the daily struggles of these people the
same potentialities of a spiritual conflict that the older poets
found in those of exalted tank.

Masefield, Gibson, Galsworthy are mainly interested in the
common mao and his sufferings. In their poetry there is a note
of sympathy fo^ their miserable lot. Their grim annals and dark
horrors find an expression in their poetry. ‘Consecration’ by
Masefield is a representative poem bringing out the modern poet’s
concern with the life of the common people. The poet says—

Others may sing of the wealth and the mirth.

The portly presence of potentates goodly in girth.

Mine be the dirt and the dross, the dust and scum of

the earth.

The modern poet is interested not only in the lives of the
poor people, but is equally inspired to treat sympathetically the
lot of the animals. Galsworthy’s Stupidity Street pleads for greater
sympathy for birds. In The Bells of Heaven, Hodgson invokes
sympathy for ‘tamed, and shabby tigers and dancing dogs and
hears.’ The Bull is another poem of sympathy for the afflicted
animals.

Realism in Modern Poetry.

The poetry of the 20th Century is marked with a note of
realism. Realism in modern poetry was the product of a reaction
against the pseudo-romanticism of the last century over and above
the influence of Science. The modern poet sees life and paints it
as it is with all its warts and ugliness. He tears the veil which the
romanticists had hung between life and art.

Rbbett Frost, Edmund Blunden, W. W. Gibson, John
Masefield are the poets of realis m in modern p oetry. Robert

♦ Robert Lynd : Introduction to an Anthology of Modern English
Poetry.

( 556 )

Frost in the Gum Gatherer , Edmaod Blunden in The Poor Man\^
Pig^ yfl. W. Gibson in The Stone and John Masefield in Cargoes,
Rupert Brooke in The Great Lover strike the note of realism.
The best expression of realism in modern poetry is to be found
among the war poets^ Owen Graves, Sasson, who have described
vividly and lealistically the horrors of war in a language that
sometimes shocks poetic sensibility. Sasson in the poem Counter
Attack **set out to present in brutal verse the realities of war
without gloss or evasion.”

Romantic Element in Modern Poetry^

Inspite of the preponderance of realism in modern poetry,
the spirit of romance continues to sway the minds of certain
poets like Walter De La Mare, James Elroy Flecker, W. B. Yeats*
John Masefield, Edward Thomas. The works of these poets
prove the fact that the spirit of romance is as old as life itself.
Walter De La Mare’s poetry is saturated with the true romantic
spirit bordering on supernaturalism. With him the ghosts and
fairies of the old world have come into their, own in the 20th
century. Flecker in his poetic drama Hassan and in poems like
The Old Ships has caught the oriental atmosphere in his poetry-
The dim moonlight of romance and chivalcy hovers over the early
poems of Gibson. In these poems the voice of the true roman-
ticist is heard in lines like these—

/ sang of Lovers and she praised my song^

The while the King looked on her with cold eyes.

Pessimistic Note in Modern Poetry.

There is a note of pessimism and disillusionment in modern
poetry. The modern poet has realised the pettiness of human
life, and the tragedy and suffering of the downtrodden people
have made him gloomy and leaden eyed. Poetry, as the express
ion of this feeling, has become autumnal in tone. Housman,
Hardy, Huxley, T. S. Eliot are the poets of pessimism and dis-
illusionment in modern poetry. They are dissatisfied with God’ and
the naked dance of chance and materialism in the modern world,
and their poetry is an arraignmet of modern society in a pessi-
mistic strain. T. S. Eliot's lines in The Waste Land are marked
with a note of pessimism—

( 557 )

What are the roots that clutch^

What branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish ? Son of man^

You cannot soy, or Guess^for you know only^

A heat of broken images^ where the sun heats
And the dead tree gives no shelter^ the cricket no relief
Religion and Mysticism in Modern Poetry,

The modern age is the age of science, but even in this
scientific age we have poems written on the subject of religion and
mysticism. Francis Thompson, Robert Grave’*, G, K. Chesterton,
Belloc, Chralotte Mew, W. B. Yeats, George Russel, arc the
great poets who have kept alive the flame of religion and mysti-
cism in their poetry. Thompson’s Hounds of Heaven and In
Strange Land are great poems of religion in modern poetry.
Rubert Graves In The Wilderness, Mrs. Meynell in I Am the
Way present the omnipotence and omniscience of God. Chesterton
in the Ballad cf White Horse, The House of Christmas evokes
the feelings of religion. Noyes was a Christian by faith, and in
joyous verse he sang, The Lord of Life is risen again and Ij)ve
is Lord of alL
Love in Modern Poetry.

Love forms the subject of many modern lyrics. Robert
Bridges has produced fine sonnets of love in The Growth of Love,
His poems Awake My Heart to be Loved : Awake, Awake^ and
I will not let thee go arc fine lyrics of love, W. B. Yeats’s When
Tou are o/t/ is a fine poem of love. Arthur Symon's The Broken
Tryset deals with disappointment in love. The lover feels despair
because the *tryst' is broken.

And then a woman passed. The hour.

Rang heavily along the air
I have no hope, I had no power
To think— for thought was but despair,

John Masefield finds a feeling of dejection in love. The
beauty of the beloved reminds him at once of the decay of physi-
cal charms. His mind never seems to forget that : —

Death has a lodge in lips as red as cherry
Death has a mansion in the yew tree berries.

( 558 )

N«lmiiiJM»dern Poetry.

MMife captivates the modeca poet no less than the poets
of the earlier ages. But the modern poet of nature is not a mystic.
He does not 6nd any spiritual meaning in Nature. He is elated
and exalted at the sight of nature’s loveliness. He gives an exqui^
site picture of birds, clouds^ landscapes, sea and the country-
side in his poetry. Masefield, Robert Bridges, Edmund Blunden
are the great poets of Nature in modero poetry.

Complexity and Psychology in Modern Poetry.

Some modern poets are interested in delving deep into the
recesses of the subconscious mind. Some of the poems of T. S.
Eliot and Ezra Pound ate dijfficult to follow because of their
psychological complexity and difficult imagery. *‘We feel that
much modern poetry is very difficult and that it does not always
repay the labour involved in working it out. In the last hundred
years complexity has been more and more heavily borne in all
of us, and a false or affected simplicity is a detestable thing.”*
This complexity in modern poetry has been accentuated by the
New Matapbysicals like T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Stephen
Spender, Cecil Day Lewis and Louis Mac-Neice. These new
metaphysicals **were often as crabbed and tortuous in ex-
pression as the least luminous of their long ago predecessors such
as Donne.”t

Loiigingness in Modern Poetry.

Longingness is at the root of all poetry whether ancient or
modern. Modern poets express longingness of all kinds in their
poetry. W. B. Yeats’s The Lake Isle of Innisfree is the yearning
of a homesick heart translated into the music of his dreams.
Rupert Brooke’s Old Vicarage, Granchester is not merely a wail,
it is a cry of homesickness. John Masefield’s Seekers is the
best example of the longing of man for God and the eternal
city of light.

Friends and loves we have none, nor wealth nor blessed

abode

But the hope of the city of Gbd at the other end of the road-
Not for us are content and quiet, and peace of mind

* G. S. Fraser : The Modern Writer and His World,
t A. C Ward : Twentieth Century Literature.

( 559 )

For we go seeking a city that we shall never find.

Diction and Style of Modern Poetry,

Modern poets have a preference for simple and direct
t*xpressioo. Old archaic words and usages are no longer in vogue.
What guides the modern poet in his selection of words is express-
iveness. Words are chosen for their association and only those
u ords arc employed which convey the meaning.

Modern poets have chosen to be free in the use of metre,

1 hey have followed Vers Lihre i. e. freedom from trammels of
verse. They have made experiments in versification. Verse rhythm
IS replaced by sense rhythm. There is free verse movement in
modern poetry.

Conclusion

The poets of to-day are sincere in their vocation. There
is the stamp of honesty in modern poetry. “The poetry of the 20th
century is less vague, less verbose, less eloquent than most poetry
of the Victorian period. It has set before itself an ideal of
absolute simplicity and sincerity — an ideal which implies an
individual and unstereotyped diction and an iodividuaT and
unstereotyped rhythms.^’*

Poetry is a criticism of life. It must maintain its contact
with life. Modern poetry is the reflection of modern life. It is
realistic in tone and expresses the spirit of the age. It cannot be
denoanced as petty, wayard and puerile. It can safely take its
place of pride in the kingdom of poetry produced from the times
of Chaucer to the modern tinges.

Q* 126. Give a brief account of English poetry of the
Nineties (1880—1914) and the poets belonging to this period of
poetry.

A ns. The Decadents.

During the ninetees of the last century an etfott was made
ui keep alive the tradition of the Pre-Raphaelite poets, Swinburne
Morris and Rossetti, and the poets of this age sought to imitate the
overcloying sweetness and luxurfousness of their predecessors. The
poets of the nineties, for their passion to keep alive the claims of

* Harriet Munro : The New Poetry.

( 560 )

ait and luxurious^ess alive in an age of growing realism have been
denounced as Decadents, They sought to escape from the world
of machinery, industry and banal morality to the world of ait.
They followed the gospel of Art for Art’s sake. Three poets belong
to the group of the Decadents. They are Ernest Dowson [1867—
19001 Lionel Johnson 11867—1902], Arthur Symons [1815— 1945|.
The group of these poets ^*had little to say that was worthwhile,
and concentrated on ornamenting the triviality of their subject
with a carefully sought, otherworldly beauty of sound.’'^

Ernest Dowson 'wrote many decorative pieces, shallow in
thought, but dangerously attractive with a finical perfection.’
He is the most purely lyrical of the group. Lionel Johnson was
a scholar and was immersed in the kingdom of books. He was
lost to the realities of life. He wrote lines echoing his scholarly
taste :

Dear heavenly books I

tVUh kindly voices, winning looks.

Enchant me with your spells of art
And draw me homeward to your heart

Stephen Phillips, the author of many poetic dramas, attracted
attention by poem like Christ in Hades (1896), Poems (1897)
and a few lyrics remarkable for their metrical ingenuities. Oscar
Wilde produced a few decadent verse marked with a lyrical flow
and the reader is particalurly impressed by his The Ballad of
Reading Goal. He wrote a good deal of persiflage. Arthur Symons
was unfortunate in being dragged in the school of the decadents
for he had poetic insight and could have written better verse. But
the few poems that he has left behind are truly decadent in tone.
They express his shallow thoughts and sweet sins in a luscious
language. John Addington Symonds imitated the verse of these
decadent poets and translated poems of medieval scholars in an
ornate style marked with floridity and diffusiveness.

I'he Realists.

The period between (1880-^1900) was the age of realism
and impressionisni in Europe as well as in England. Three poets
of this period are reailistic. Wilfred Blunt (1840—1922), William

* B. Albert : A History of English Literature.

( 561 )

Ernest Henley (1849—1903), Rudyard Kipling (1865—1936), kept
alive the claims of realism at a time when the Decadents were
attempting to surcharge poetic thoughts with emotionalism and
luscious passion. W. Blunt presented the ugliness of modern
industrial civilization in his poetry, but be had no appreciation
for the sordidness that he brought out in his verses. He express-
ed bis disgust at the ugliness and drabness of industrial life.
Unfortunately he could not transform the ugliness of modern life
into poetic material, and beauty and loveliness. £. Henley
was a great admirer of Blunt and was a pioneer of the new
realism in English poetry. He is well known by the collection
of poems published in the volume named In Hospital, The poems
of Henley are symbolical in character. They ace symbol both of
the sickness of the modern world and its preoccupation with
science. Henley is the first poet of the new age who used ugli-
ness, meanness and pain as the subjects of poetry. “Henley’s
hospital poems arc perhaps, the first in which an English poet
finds completely satisfactory images in the kind of ugliness
peculiar to the modern world." Here is an example of Henley’s
ugly realism — ^

As hi7/j varnish red and glistening
Dripped his hair^ his feet looked rigid;

Raised, he settled stiffly side ways
You could see Ids' hurts were spinil.

&

My head is bloodly but undowed
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936).

Kipling was the great imperialist poet of the present age
and his poems are to be found in Departmental Ditties (1886)
and Barrack Room Ballads (1892), The Seven Seas (1896), The Five
Nations (1903), Inclusive ^erse and Poems (1930).

Kipling was essentially the poet of the soldiers and sailors,
and many of his poems arc written on the exploits of these British
tommies in a language spoken by them. ‘By making the uneduca-
ted British fighting man articulate Kipling brought a new element
into English poetry." Though Kipling was himself a cultarcd
Anglo Indian, but to give the air of verisimilitude to his verse, be
introduced the ‘Cockney dialect’ in poetry which was virtually a

( 552 )

foieign toDgoe to him. "In his use of this dialect, thctcfote, he
was petfocmiog a litetaty trick, rather than employing a natural
medium of expression: the self-conscious mao of letters can be
detectied behind the tatter of illiterate sounds.”'''

Another significant note in Kipling’s poetry is that of
imperialism. He is the poet of England and the Laureate of the
Empire. He made the English conscious of their great heritage
and topsed feelings of superiority over the backward and un-
developed races. Imperialism found a cleat and unabashed voice
in him. ‘He exulted in the achievements of his countrymen in
founding the Empire and did not care to emphasise the harsh and
cruel means adopted to increase its bounds. Charles Williams
says, '‘He talked of England in a way that destroyed all England’s
greatness.”

“His poetry has little metaphysical interest. What served
as a philosophy of life in most of Kipling’s poetry was the convic-
tion that Englishmen were divinely charged with the duty of
enlightening the world’s —

Fluttered folk and mid--
Your new caughtf sullen-people^ s
Half-devil and half-child.

His attitude was partly domineering and partly that of a
benevolent despot. He preached that the cleaners were not to
expect gratitude for their pains —

Take up the white man^s burden
And reap his old reward. .

Kipling’s poetry is marked with a note of vigour and mas-
culinity. He was a realist and asserted the claims of virility and
actuality. His poems sing the song of ordinary healthy manhood.
The love of masculine life is his keynote. He preferred a court
geous and dangerous way of living to silly romanticism.

Kipling is equally interested in Indian life, and bis tw'>
poetns Shiva and Grasshopper and A Song of Kabir show hi.
full understanding of the spirit of Hindu tradition. He has
composed poems on Indian people such as Ganvn and In lan
politiical ^nd religious thought. ,

•Hjk.C, Ward ; Twentieth Century Literature.

( 563 )

Kipling wrote a number o£ poems dealing with Nature and
country life. Suxsses and the Flouers deserve attention.
But his nature poetry is not impressive. “He is not capable of
noticing the delicate hues and tones of Nature. He paints any-
thing that strikes his eye with a few rapid strokes.*'

*‘As a craftsman in verse his equipment was that of a master-
in-embryo. He did not always use his technical gift to advantage
and when the weeding out process is undertaken there will be
much doggerel to. remove. But over his ready tendency to drop
into jog-trot verse must be set the almost Miltonic impressiveness
with which he marshalled the pageantry of names-names of people
and places, of ships, dowers and herbs.*’* In some poems there i!>
often craftsmanship but he lacked “chat intensity of vision which
vitalizes the idea and spirit of great poetry.”**

To the sensitive mind Kipling often appears a little noisy
and vulgar. His sense of racial superiority and aggressive imperia-
lism appears nauseating. His didacticism smacks of supercilious-
ne^s, He has been intolerable in redned circles. “These were
antagonised by what they considered to be his militant imperialism,
his hotch-potch of brutality and sentimentality, his banjo rhythms,
and his addiction to a pseudo-cockney style of utterance which
represented his notion of English soldier’s speech. ”t “As a poet
Kipling claims credit for reintroducing realism and racy vigour
into the verse of the ninetces. At his best he achieves genuine
poetry; at his worst he can be mechanically and stridently crude.
He lacks delicacy of touch. He is a ceaseless experimenter in
verse forms and rhythms, and his main themes are those of his
prose works.

3. The Pessimists.

The two great pessimistic poets of the ninetces are Thomas
Hardy and A. E. Housman. They kept alive the spirit of question-
ing about sense and outward things and gave a jolt to the feelings
of self complacency and cheap optimism of the Victorians. Their
poetry is the final expression of the disillusionment which had

♦ A. C. Ward ; Twentieth Century Literature.

** A. C. Word— Twentieth Century Literature,
t Ibid.

i E. Albert — A History of English Literature.

( 564 )

been at work ever sioce the sixteenth and seventeeth centuties.

Thomas Hardy (1840—1928).

The fame of Hardy as a poet rests on Wessex Poems (written
between 1865 and 1870), Poems of the Past and Present (1901),
The Dynasts (Part I 1903. II 1906, III 1908), Time's Laughing-
Stocks (1909), Satires of Circumstance (1914), Moment of Vision
and Miscellaneous Verses (1917), Later Lyrics and Earlier (1922),
Humun Shows (1925). Winter Words (1928), Collected Poems
(1932). “If we accept The Dynasts, his epic drama of the
Napoleonic wars, cast in a gigantic mould, the bulk of Hardy’s
verse consists of (hort lyrics pithily condensed in expression,
often intentionally angular in rhythm but always showing great
technical care and a love of experimentation “ The Dynasts is
Hardy’s monumental work. It is the biggest and most sustained
work in English Literature since the Victorian age. It deals of the
War with Napoleon from 1805 to 1815 and consists of nineteen
acts and one hundred and thirty scenes. It reveals the working of
Destiny, ^presiding over all, cruel in its blindness’ in its grimmest
aspect, and is, in the words of Lascelles Abercrombie, “the
biggest, the most consistent and deliberate exhibition of fatalism
in literature.” In the words of Harold Williams, “The Dynasts,
in the grand simplicity of its imaginative scene, wherein the land,
cities, peoples and armies of Europe are revealed as in a single
spectacle, moving, breathing, writhing in meaningless and self-
immolating tragedy, is the most impressive achievement in English
Literature for two or three generations.”* Its appeal is to. the
intellect rather than to the eye. It may not have gieat poetry
except at places, but it shows Hardy’s extraordinary architectural
skill and may be called the final culmination of his philosophy.
“It is not a story out of which a philosophy emerges, but rathes
a philosophy unfolded through the tragic events of this story.”**
In this work Hardy has employed a language, *full of images which
crowd fast upon another with cumulative suggestive strength.’

In popular opinion Hardy is a novelist par excellence and
his real work is to be found in his novels. But Hardy himself did
not have this opinion about his genius. He liked to be known as

* Harold Williams : Modern English Writers.

** Scott -James : Fifty Years of English Literature.

( 565 )

ft poet rathet than a novelist. ""To be a poet, to give hi$ life to
poetry that had always been his desite, and if he had been quite free
to choose it is likely that he would have written no novels at alL*^f
Lionel Johnson, writing in 1896, felt constrained to compare
Hardy, not with another novelist, but not with a great poet—
Wordsworth. The fact is that the soul of Hardy was animated by
poetic feelings and even in his prose works the poetic feeling
gushes out with an emotional force. ^‘Poetic feeling and powei
are evinced in all the more moving passages in the novels; Marty
.South’s lament in The Woodlanders^ though written as prose,
may stand as one of the superb the most moving lyrics of the
English language.*’

Hardy’s Melancholy and Belief in Destiny.

The melancholy, which is a characteristic feature of
Hardy’s fiction, continues to pervade his poetry. ‘‘Funny man.
Browning,” Hardy is reported to have said once, *'ali that
optimism 1 He must have put it in to please the public. He can't
have believed it.” Hardy was temperamentally incapable of seeing
any justification for optimism. His poems reveal the miseries and
sufferings of human life. He presents the cruel working of destiny
in human life spoiling the chances of man's happiness. Destiny
strews joy and pain with a nerveless and purposeless band :

These purblind Doomsters had as reidily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.

In one form or another this power of destiny is presented in
Hardy's poetry. His voice is raised against God, whom he calls a
blackguard :

Has some Vast Imbecility
Mighty to build and blend.

But impotent to tend.

Framed us in jest, and left us now to hazardry ?

Or come we of an Automaton
Unconscious of our pains.

He protests against the Immanent Will, weaving the cruel web
of life.

Like a knitter drowsed,

t Scott-James ; Fifty Years of English Literature.

( 566 )

Whose fingers play in skilled unmindfulness.

The will has woven with an absent heed.

Since life first was ; and ever will so weave.

Hardy as a Poet of Love.

Hardy’s love* poems are the most intense and impassioned
part o{ his work. He deals with problems arising out of unhappy
marriages, and children born out of unhappy wedlock. The Flirts*
Tragedy, A Sunday Morning Tragedy, The Home Coming arc some
of his significant love poems ending in tragedy. His love-poems^
even though the majority of them are poems of frustration, hold
us under the spell of reality like a tragedy in a neighbour’s house.
**To have lived even for an hour is with Browning to live for
ever after in the inheritance of a mighty achievement. To have
lived for an hour is in, Mr. Hardy’s Imagination, to have deepened
the sadness even more than the beauty of one’s memories.”

Hardy’s Lyrics.

Hardy has left behind a number of lyrics, but they lack the
rapture and abandon, music and emotionalism of fine lyrics like
those of Herrick and Shelley. Hardy’s lyrics are stiff and resemble
the work of the philosophical lyrists of the seventeenth century. His
lyrics tack flexibility and spontaneity. **In the later lyrical poems
there is a greater weight of experience, and emotion arising from
experience, a deeper undercurrent of thought, and a variety and
richness of diction.”* His lyrics are intense and in a few words he
presents an experience deep and moving. It had been the opinion
among some ciitics that Hardy being essentially *a spacious writer’
was incapable of writing short, intense lyrics. But his two lyrics
In Time of the Breaking of Nations containing only sixty three
words and Shelley’s Skylark falsify the accusation against Hardy’s
lyric genius. **The fewness of the words in no way reduces the
magnitude of the achievement; rather it enhances it, by fulfilling
one of the requirements of great poetry that it should hold ^an
ocean of thought in a drop of language.”**

Hardy’s Monotony.

There is a note of monotony and dullness in Hardy’s
poetry. His colours are invariably gcay. **He tells tales of tragic

* Septt James : Fifty Years of English Literature.

** A. C Ward : Twentieth Century Literature.

( 567 )

irony» of frustrated love, of passion followed by disillusion,
misery by deceit, of a teasing woman who provokes tragedy,
of lost faith/* ^ All these lead to a feeling of monotony and
unhappiness in the heart of the reader. ‘‘Never at any time is
Hardy's poetry intoxicating or magical. Occasionally it approa-
ches profundity, or rises towards a guarded exultation, but its
chief characteristic is a *sati^fying flatness' It is satisfying because
it presents the interesting spectacle of a mind continually probing
and exploring; while its ‘flatness’ is produced by the persistent
pressure of the Spirit of Negation.”^’^

Tilt Style and Diction of Hardy’s Poems.

There is very little verbal felicity in Hardy’s poems. Many
of his lines are paintully prosaic. There is a wanton angularity of
phrase in his poems. The charm of verbal felicity is lacking in
them. The use of a variety of terms belonging to science and
philosophy ace in the opinion of A. C. Ward, “as disturbing as an
ugly wound on an otherwise comely face.” “His tardiness in
obtaining recognition as a great poet may be due to the fact that
with his harsh, prosaic diction and simple, often stark metre, he
wrote like nobody elsc.”f
A. E. Housman (1859 — 1936).

The poetry of Housman bears a close affinity to that of
Hardy. His poetic output was small, but it would be difficult
to find a weak line in his slender production. “Everything was
winnowed with scrupulous care, and he admitted nothing super-
fluous or merely decorative in form or style.” He produced
A Shropshire Lad ( 1896 ), Last Poems ( 1922 ), and More Poems
( 1936 ). The predominant mood in his poetry is one of ‘cultured
ironical disillusionment with life; though underlying this tragic
view there is a warm appreciation lor the beauties of nature
particularly in the sixty three poems of A Shropshire Lad
presenting the country life of the Welsh border. “Tragic
in tone^ often to the point of morbidity, the poems of Housman
have the polished ease and restraint which might be expected of
so fine 9 classical scholar. They arc concise, sometimes epigra-

* A. C. Ward : Twentieth Century Literature.

** Dr* A. S. Collins : English Literature of the 20th Century,
t Moody and Lovett : A History of English Literature.

( 568 )

inmatic in expre$sioD yet always perfectly easy to uodetstand,
and the emotion is handled with a sureness of touch which
never macs an effect by over-emphasis/^* Housman dealt in his
poetry with primitive themes in musical language, with a sweet-
ness broken by irony and the tang of cruel disillusion. Music
came to him under the stress of emotion, but it was controlled by
his scholarly sense for metre.

The three themes which attract him are Soldiership, Love,
and the Gallows. He has satirised war and soldiers. Love is
something to be avoided in Housman’s view, Lo^c is connected
irretrievably with death. Gallows attract him and the poem The
Culprit expresses bis horror of the gallows.

Housman is recognised as a pessimist in modern poetry.
The lines in his Other Summers are soaked in pessimistic feeling—'

They came and were and are not.

And came no more anew.

And all the years and seasons

That ever can ensue

Must now be worse and few.

*'Yet strangely enough even the cruellest pessimism which
thrust itself into his most charming ballads is not depressing ;
for we are in the presence of a strong if obstinate character,
who finds exultation in his pessimism and his power of turning
beauty into pain, pain into contempt, and both into accompli-
shed verse.”*

It is Housman’s love of Nature that relieves much of the
tedium of his pessimistic thought. His nature poetry is passion-
ate and unaffected. **His affectionate portrayal of the lovely
details of Nature acts as an antiseptic to the gloom of his
philsophy.”

Housman’s style is bleak and classical. There is a profusion
of mono- syllables in his poetry. He certainly succeeds in evolving
grand music.

A comparison between Housman and Hardy will not be out
of place at this stage. **Hardy lived entrenched behind his
8oml;if9 defences, Housman was out in the open, serene amid the

r-#- —

* & Albert : A History of English Literature.

** Scottjames : Fifty Years of English Literature.

( 569 )

battle— undismayed because eutitely without hope :

/ pace the earth, and drink the air, and feel the sun,

Bui still, be still, my soul ; it is but for a season :

Let us endure an hour and see injustice done.

Hatdy was too sensitive to be actively a rebel ; Housman
too resolute in an heroic despair.*'’*^

4. Transitional Poets.

Robert Bridges, Gerald Manley Hopkins, William Butlet
Yeats, Francis Thompson, Gordon Bottomley were the main
transitional poets who paved the way for the Georgian group of
poets to be discussed in the next question. We will briefly deal
with their works and their contribution to poetry.

Robert Bridges (1844 — 1930)

Robert Bridges who succeeded Alfred Austin as Poet-
Laureate in 1913 has to his credit quite an appreciable body of
poetry most of which is of a high quality. His first volume
Shorter Poems appeared anonymously in 1873, and later on
further volumes were brought out in 1879, 1880, 1890, 1894.
The Growth of Love, a sonnet sequence, was published in 1889
after many alterations. In this collection there are seventy nine
sonnets and they are a mixture of Petrarchan and Shakespearean
form. They ate marked with technical excellence but are without
the depth of feeling which characterise the sonnets of Elizabeth
Barret Browning in The Sonnets of the Portugese. Prometheus
the Firegiver (1883) and Eros and Psyche (1885) ate elaborate
poems but they ate over- lengthy and long winded. They present
fine pictures, of Italian countryside and exhibit Bridge’s techni-
cal skill in the handling of the metre. New Poems (1889), a
volume, contains some fine pieces of good landscapes. Poems
in classical Prosody (1903) and Later Poems (1914) have poor
stuff and the handling of the subject of war and politics does
little credit to the poet’s artistic genius. A change for the better
is perceptible in October and other Poems (1928) and New Verse
(1925), and most of the poems in these collections ate lyrical.
Memories of his childhood and experiences of his later years ate
sll handled with the artistry of Bridges at his best. In 1929 was

* A. C. Ward : Twentieth Century Literature.

( 570 )

produced the philosophical poem The Testament af Beauty which
is the swan song of Bridge’s life and is his lasting contribution
to the poetic literature of his country. In this monumental work
Bridges presents beauty as the supreme force in life and traces
ms ns's growth to perfect wisdom. The poem is a philosophical
dissertation on the stages of human progress, and the function
of the artistic spirit in leading mankind towards self control
and self-knowledge. In this poem Bridges, **draws upon almost
every field of knowledge, and the poem, o^er lengthy and digress*
ive, suffers from its unorthodox spellings and an unusual laxity
in matters of technique. However, it contains many fine pass-
ages, and, in spite of its weakness, stands high among English
philosophical poems on the grand scale.”*

Bridge’s Choice of Subject.

Bridges was essentially an artist and naturally he chose
to compose poetry on artistic subjects like Beauty, Love and
Nature. In the poems of 1914 he had made attempts to bring
politics and was in the field of poetry, but later on he gave up
the idea of employing his muse on the rugged subjects of the
hurly-burly of life and refused to ha^e any traffic with the sterner
issues , of reality. **The beauties of nature, the charm of land*
scape in particular, the joy of romance of love, memories of an
almost idyllic childhood, these are the themes which he treated
with the good breeding and absence of passion demanded of a
gentleman.”**

Tranquillity and Peace in bridge’s Poetry.

A contemplative and un fevered temper is needed to appre-
ciate the poetry of Robert Bridges. An atmosphere of tranquillity
spreads over his work. He does not raise his voice into a shout,
mor his lamentations into loud sobs. “He is always serene : feeling
is contained in his verse rather than expressed by it. His emotion
is ^emotion recollected in tranquillity and this tranquil air is
present in his landscape pieces also.”

**Bridges is essentially a passionate writer, yet his passion has
light without heat. His finest work has the chill beauty of a spring
dawn — a dawn of gradually diffused silver gray, never merging

* E. Albert : A History of English Literature.

** Ibid.

f 571 )

into anything warmer than a faint delicate amber. There are
scarlets, no purple in his work. It expresses no thrill of wonder,
DO strange apocalypse of beauty ; merely a wistful surmise, or
ecstasy so faint that unless we listen carefully to his tones we may
miss it. He is reflective and pensive like Arnold ; he is austerely
cool like Landot.’"

As An Artist.

“What led me to poetry** Bridges has said, “was the in-
exhaustible satisfaction of form It was an art which I hoped to

learn.*' Bridges has learnt the art very nicely and the stamp of
the artist’s pen is on every line of his verse. “The result is a
limpid clarity of style, a delicacy of touch, a perfection of musical
appeal, and a subtlety of rhythmic pattern which give his work an
easy rightness. Yet bis art, so wonderfully concealed, gives to
his most personal poems a remoteness of feeling which betrays
the careful craftsman lying behind them." (£. Albert).

As a Lyric Writer.

As a writer of lyrics. Bridges lacked the force and Are of
Shelley’s lyrics. He had too much of temperamental reserve to
soar aloft on the wings of lyric fancy. His lyric poems are marked
with artistic beauty, but the fire of passion and the heat of emotion
do not kindle them. They are cold and tranquil like the rest of
his poems.

As a Poet of Love.

Bridge’s love poetry is found in The Growth of Love^ a
sonnet sequence. The love poems of Bridges are tranquil and lack
tumultuous passion. They are free from violence and vehemence.
The stamp of purity signalises them all. The purity of deep but
quite affection prevails in his love poems. Dr. Cousin rightly
remarks, “Here Mr. Bridges takes his place with honour among
the great lovers in song, not great in exaltation or in depth but
great in loyalty and purity.” Awake my heart, to be loved, awake
is one of the finest love-lyrics of the poet.

As a Poet of Joy and Optimism.

Bridges is the poet of joy and optimism. He is, in the words
of Robert Lynd, “the poet of nine o’clock in the morning.” We
never miss in his poetry the note of joy and cheerfulness. He
accepts life cheerfully, with all its ills, for he finds joy io/thc

( 572 )

simplest beauties of life. He says —

Life and joy are one-^we-know not why ^

As though our very blood long breathless lain
Had tasted of the breath of God again.

As a Poet of Beauty.

Bridges is the direct descendant of Keats in the appreciation
of beauty. His Testament of Beauty is a monumental work in this
direction. According to Bridges earthly beauty is only a stepping
stone to heavenly beauty. He says :

All earthy beauthy has one cause and proof
To lead the pilgrim soul to beauty above.

Beauty, for Bridges, is not merely an earthly vision oi
womanly grace, but the manifestation of divine sublimity in
human life^Beauty is

The eternal spouse of the wisdom of God,

And an Angel of His presence through all creatiom
Bridges as the Poet of Nature and Landscapes.

Bridges is a great lover of nature and portrays the lands-
capes of the South of England ^bathed in a warm and comfortable
glow.’ *‘His enjoyment of nature is personal and first hand and
his expression of her beauty is simple and direct, unaffected by
any artificial glow of imagination.” He presents the hills, the
rivers, the meadows, and the clouds in a charming manner. There
are no purple patches in his poetry of nature; his landscapes of
the South country, of the Thomas Valley, arc quite, sweet and
peaceful, never wild, rugged or magnificent. The descriptive
pieces are delightfully sweet and exquisitely beautiful. But their
charm is that of peace and tranquillity. *'I think the charm of
R.obert Bridges,” writes Lafeadeo Hearns, **who is especially a
nature poet, lies in his love of quite effects, pale colours, small
soft sounds, all the dreaminess and all the greatness of still and
beautiful days.”

As a Metrical Artist and Technician in Verse.

It was Bridge’s effort to naturalise classical metres in English*
He sought to introduce in the English language some of the rich-
ness of vowel sounds. 'Hn the work of his early and middle life,
In dram ts, masks and shorter poems he attained a consistently

( S73 )

high level of metrical excellence.”^ Bridges threw light upon the
laws and secrets of English versification and excited considerable
interest in the study of metre and prosody.

Gerald Manley Hopkins (1844—89).

Hopkins stands out as a religious poet with religious procli-
vities. He was bred an Anglican, but became a Roman Catholic in
1866, and two years later enteced the society of Jesuists. His early
verses reveal his love for religion, nature and God. He glorifies
God and his own soul in the early poems. In 1875 he wrote The
Wreck of the Dentschland^ his longest and most difficult poem,
recounting the deaths of five nuns who went down in that ship
(Oentschlacd). It is a pathetic poem marked with a tragic
pathos. The last five years ot Hopkins were spent in disttess and
he felt that God had forsaken him. This feeling urged him to
write sonnets of personal character marked with a feeling of
poignancy and depth. Before the end, he outsoared the shadow of
the dark night of the soul and in his poem — That J\ature is «
fferaditean Fire, and of the Comjort of the Resurrection, he
regained his lost faith in God. He sees all Nature consumed to
ashes and his soul alone standing imperishable like an ‘immortal
diamond ’ He continued to wjci(e yerses in which he expressed his
glorification of God, and His creation.

It has been suggested ^that the poet in Hopkins was strangled
by the priest ’ This suggestion is partially true for the poetry of
Hopkins, while glorifying God, is not without the queering
sensibility for the beauties of nature. His appreciation ot nature
is deep and heartfelt. His early poetry before 1878 shows a
sensuous love of nature.

Hopkins will be remembered for his diction and rhythmic
innovation. In the choice of words, he exhibited personal
idiosyncrasies. He believed that poetry called for a language
distinct from that of prose, a language rich in suggestion both to
the senses and the intellect. True to his belief he employed words
which are archaic and colloquial in character. He used compound
epithets such as, ‘drop-of- blood, foam dapple cherry.'

He made experiment with sprung rhythm which made its

* Scott-James : Fifty Years of English Literature.

( 574 ;

first appearance in Wreck of the Dentschland. This sprung
rhythm had earlier been tried by Milton in Samson AgonisteSy but
it was Hopkins who gave it a new lease of life. The basic principle
of this attempt, which breaks away from strictly conventional
patterns, is that each foot contains one stress, possibly, but not
necessarily, followed by any number of unstressed syllables.

Hopkins’s imagery is rich and precise. He employs image of
a suggestive character, and his pictures often suggest more than
one interpretation. Often he combines emotional and intellectual
figures which remind us of the seventeenth century metaphysical
poets.

William Butler Yeats (1865—1939).

‘W. B. Yeats was at the centre of the Irish Literary
movement and was indispensable to its existence.’ He was a poet
and a dramatist, and all his creative work is marked with fine
poetic touches. He harnessed his pen in the service of poetry
for nearly fifty years and, *Mn fifty years he evolved from a
dreamer to a realist, and from a realist to a passionate metaphy-
sical seer. Thought and passion drove him all his life. He was
a poet all the time, and a great poet.”*

The early poetry of Yeats is very much different in tone and
temper from his later poetry. In the verses produced till 1900 we
have in Yeats’s poetry the dreaminess, picturesqueoess and
mythological love of the Pre-Rcphaelite poets. ‘In the easy charm
and delicate, smooth-grace of his early work, the influence of the
Pre-Rviphaelites is clearly seen’. There is a mystical, dream like
quality in the early poems to be found in The Wanderings Of
Oisin (1899), Poems (1895), The Wind among the Reeds (1899), and
The Shadowy Water (1900). The study of these poems clearly
reveals Yeats as a mystic and a lauerate of the faery land. He
seeks to find a refuge in the world of picturesque poetry from the
materialism and the spiritual barrenness of the age. ‘The boy’s
imagination entered fairyland, and he was bewitched for life into
a longing for magic.’ He delved deep into Irish love and he
brought out the old life of the Irish people with their love for
romance and magic. ‘Life was a reservoir of racial memoiies,

^ Dr. A. S. Collins : English Literature of the 20th Century.

( 575 t

from which the poet could dtaw by the magic of symbolic evoca-
tioD^ ^‘Ancient things and the stuff of dccams”— these words
give the keynote of Yeats’s entire poetic outlook in these early
years of his poetic career. He was mote at home in dreams than
in actualities; more at ease in the world of symbols* than in stern
realities of life; more in company with Beauty and Nature than
with the sordid and ugly things of life. It was at this period that
Yeats felt shocked by ugly things and wrote. ^*The wrong of
unshapely thing is a wrong too great to be told.”

From 1900 onwards there came a change in Y"eats"s poetic
outlook. The dreamer of dreams and the lover of old-far orf things
was shaken by the crude realities of life, and was drawn more and
more to the vortex of a giddy life. Poetry for Yeats w^as now no
more an escape from reality but became a grappling with tbe
stern realities of the world The increasing realism of this period
is clearly noticed in The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910),
Responsibilities (1914). The Irish troubles of 1916 and tbe Great
War of 1914 — 1918 brought a change in his outlook and made
him grim, gloomy, sorrowful and philosophical in his poetry.
The Wild Swans at Coole^ The Tower (192S), The Winding Stair
and Other Poems (1933), New Poems (1938), Last Poems (1939),
reveal tension between the dreamer and the man of affairs,
between the poetic and the practical life. ‘The heaven’s embroi-
dered cloth’ mt.y still be seen in the poems of this period, but the
edges are frayed, and there is, instead, the majesty of starkness.
The mists have grown thick and impenetrable about him. As T.
Maynard has put it, “the poet is wandering in a choking fog,
feverishly striking matches in the gloom and hiding them under-
neath his waterproof !*'

In the poems of this period a note of suffering and srdness
is clearly perceptible. The poet will now make the ‘cloak of
sorrow.’ It is ‘the hour of the wanting of love-’ Romance and
the fairy world are no longer there. ‘Romantic Ireland’s dead and
gone’. The dawn of evil age is envisaged by the poet. The
poetry of this period proves that, “no poet has been successful in
escaping from earth and making his poetry exclusively from the

** Yeats has employed the symbol of ‘Rose’ and ‘Tower’ in his
poetry and is influenced by the work of the French Symbolists.

( 576 )

tipestdes of heaven.”*

The enure poetic production of Yeats is marked with limpid
and languorous ease. The verse bears the qualities of the Irish
natiooai character— moody, showy, and dreamy. His artistry is
unchallenged. His melody and music, the singing quality in his
poetry, rings through all his poems. Yeats, above all, is a singer,
and the flow of his lines, particularly in his lyrics, is limpid and
entbrallingly captivating.

His artistry is something which impresses all his readers
“From the first, Yeats was an accomplished poetic artist, though
his mastery of language and rhythm grew steadily throughout his
career. From the Pre-Raphaelite aestheticism of his early verse,
with its quest for beauty, its conscious, often sentimental simp-
licity, and its languid, melodic grace, he developed a more direct
and virile expression. There is the same delicacy of workmanship,
and the gorgeous phrase still flashes among the everyday language
and personal direct expression of his maturity.”**

OTHRR TRANSinONAL POETS-

Gordon Bottomlcy (1874—1948).

Bottofnley, the dramatist, was the writer of romantic
poems. His work marks out the influence of D. G. Rossetti.
“Reading his poems we see him developing from within outwards,
using as the raw material of his experience what has come to him
from literature, legend, myth, and investing the life that he does
see around him with the quality of legend and myth, showing
man in the round, larger than life, more heroic or more villaneous,
more elemental.”f His poems are remarkable for their images.
Visibility, sound and even odour provide him the stuff of his
images. In The End of the World we find Bottomley giving us
the image of a world where desolating cold envelops everything—

The coldness seemed more nigh, the coldness deepened

As a sound deepens into silences;

It was of earth and came not by the air;

The earth was cooling and drew down the sky.

* A. C. Ward : Twentieth Century Literature.

*1* E. Albert : A History of English Literature,
t Scott-James : Fifty Years of English Literature.

( 577 )

Bottotnlcy will be ceneinbeced foi zomaocct oiagic and hcioic
happenings. His poetry ‘deals in portents and magic and heroic
happenings and in human life rarefied and universalized.’

William Watson.

He is almost forgotten to-day, but he stood high at the turn
of the country. His Shorter Poems and Wordsworth's Grave are
memorable. After a verse tale. The Prince's Quest (1880),
written in the style of William Morris, Watson turned his face
against romantic poetry and revived the ideal of the eighteenth
century, “What oft was thought but never so well expressed.” He
maintained dignity of style and expressed his thoughts in rich
diction.

Francis Thompson (1860 — 14(i7).

Among the religious writers of the age Francis Thompson
bolds a very high place. He is known by his two poems The
Hounds of Heaven and In No Strange Land. The Hounds of Heaven
is a gorgeous poem presenting in majestic and gold- like images
the pursuit of flying man from the hounds of heaven. It is
thick- sown with metaphor, and full of the echoes of Crawshaw,
Donne and Spenser. This poem clearly shows that Thompson
intended to use words 'as the maker ot tapestry uses his threads,
to weave a beautiful pattern, making of poetry an art confined
within the limits of the pictorial and melodious.’ In No Strange
Land is a poem of mysticism, and is free from the flamboyant
note of the first poem. His other poems ate to be found in New
Poems (1897).

Q. 127. Write a note on Georgian Poetry and Georgian
Poets.

Ans. Georgian poetry covers the period from 1910 to
1935 when George V was the King presiding over the destinies of
the British empire. The poetry of this period was issued in
five volumes, dated respectively 1911 — 12, 1913—15, 1916—17,
1918 — 19 and 1920—22, edited by Sir Edward Marsh who died in
1953. The poets who figured prominently in these volumes were
Lascelles Abercrombie, Gordon Bottomley, Rupert Brooke, G. K.
Chesterton, W. H. Davies, Walter De La Mate, John Osinkwatet,

( 578 )

James Elroy Flecker, W. W. Gibson, D. H. Lawrence, John
Masefield, Harold Monro, T. Sturge oore, Ronald Ross, W. J.
Turner, J. C. Squire, Siegfried Sasson, J. Roseoberg, Robert
Nicholas, Robert Graves, John Freeman, Maurice Bating, Edwaid
Shanks, Edmund Blunden and Mortin Armstrong, “in reading
this list of fepresentative poets we must conclude that if the
quantity of poets engaged is in any way equalled by their quality
this period must indeed have been one of great poetic 'strength
and beauty."*

What were the general features of Georgian poetry ? What
did they set about doing in the realm of poetry ? These are
pertinent questions and deserve a critical examination, "The
Georgians had, of course, a positive aim : it was to treat natural
things in a clear, natural and beautiful way neither too modern,
nor too like Tennyson."** In their treatment of nature and social
life they discarded the use of archaic diction such as 'thee* and
‘thou’, and eschewed such poetical constructions as "winter
drear", and 'host on armed/" host.’ They dropped all gorgeous
and grandiloquent expiessions and generally avoided pomposities
of thought and expression. In reaction;«to Victorianism their
veise avoided 'all formally religious, philosophic or improving
themes’, and in reaction to the decadent poets of the ninetees
they avoided all subjects that smacked of "sadness, wickedness
and cafe- table." They were neither imperialistic nor pantheistic
but 'as simple as a child’s reading book.’ Their subjects were
to be, "Nature, love, leisure, old age, childhood, animals, sleep,
unemotional subjects." The Georgian poets wrote extremely
neat and vecy melodious poems about sheep, bulls and other
domestic or wild animals. They also celebrated in pleasing verse
the charm of various localities in the British Isles. Quietly they
longed for the good old days and ways.

Commenting on the general nature and contribution of
Georgian poetry E. Albert very nicely remarks, *'The8e poets had,
of course, their clearly recognizable individual qualities, but were

* Scott^jamefi — Fifty Years of English Literature. ‘Strength and
beauty’ refer to Marsh’s observation on Georgian poetry in the
Preface.

^* Dr. A. S. Collins — English Literature of the 20tb Century*

( 579 )

•like io theic rejection of the ideas of the decadents, theit quest foi
simplicity and reality, their love of natural beauty, especially as
found in the English landscape, and their adherence to the forms
and techniques of the main traditions of English poetry. In theii
own way they, too, were escapist ; for the most part, their work
shows little awareness of the industrial world around them, and
often it has an all too obvious facility of technique and shallow-
ness ol feeling.”*

Georgian poetry has been subjected to severe criticism.
Robert Graves, who once belonged to this group, critised ihc
Georgian poets in his Common Asphodel published in 1949. The
reaction of the next generation was **rathec to be that they were
tnerley writing nice poetry for nice people, and that they were too
inclined to indulge in mutual praise.”**

Having pointed out the general features of Georgian
poetry, let us now examine the work of the prominent
Georgian poets.

Jhon A^easefield (1878—).

John Masefield succeeded Robert Bridges as poet Laureate
in 1930, and is still adorning this title of fame with dignity and
distinction, Masefield is a poet, novelist, short story writer,
dramatist and essayist.

Masefield’s early poetry was written in the style and
manner of Kipling and was marked with a note of action and
adventure. It was characterised by Chaucerian breadth of huma-
nity. Salt- Water Ballads (1902) brought out his genius as a poet
to the forefront, and the poems in this volume reveal him as
a lover of the sea. Written from first- hand experience, they blend a
sense of the romance and beauty of the sea with a thorough know-
ledge of seamen.” Ballads dnd Poems (1910) reveals advance in
technical skill. The Everlasting Mercy (1911) is the first great
narrative poem of Masefield. It deals with the conversion of a
drunken poacher by a Methodist woman. Saul Kene, the
drunkard narrates his own story in a language which is extremely
realistic, coarse,' end brutal. ‘‘The violent, often crude realisna
of this poem in acto-sy liable couplets is deliberately shocking

* E. Albert— A History of English Literature.

** Dr. A. S. Collins— English Literature of the 20th Century.

< 580 )

protest against the anemia which afflioted contemporary poetry.*'
It was followed in a similar vein by The Widow in the Bye street
(1912), The Daffodil Fields (1913) and Lolfingdown Down (1917).
^*With these four poems Mr. Mase6eld poured new life into
English narrative verse. No old far-off-themes and stately diction
tor him, but common contemporary life in the taw, described in
outspoken, almost brutal language — the conversion of a hardened
ruffian, the hanging of a widow’s son”,* Dauber (1913) is an
autobiographical poem describing the life of a youth who runs
away to sea, and contains many reminiscences of the poet’s early
life. It is realistic in tone but has many fine passages * which
catch the wonder and magic of the sea.’ Reynard the Fox (1919)
and Right Royal (1920) are vigorous narrative poems describing
the fox-hunt in a vivid manner. In Reynard the Fox we have ‘a
little Odyssey of fox-hunting.’ It contains many Chaucerian
thumb-nail sketches of human character. Here the poet is
control of his rhythm and metres, and not their slave as in the
earlier narrative poems.’ These poems ^‘though vigorously realistic
are more natural in tone and show his love for country life.’
Reynard the Fox^ in the opinion of A. C. Ward, ‘’is among the
best sustained narrative poems written in the quarter century.”
The other collections of Masefield’s verse are to be found in
hiidsu mmer Night (1928), Collected Poems (1932), End and Be ^in-
nlng (1934) and Wondering (1943).

Masefield is the poet of the people and his poetry is
surcharged with demo static sympathy fox the downtrodden and the
miserable suffering people. In Consecration he made an avowal
•f his faith in the under-dog —

Others may sing of the wine and the wealth and the mirths

The portly presence of potentates goodly in girths

Mine be the dirt and the dross, the dust and scum of the

earth.

Masefield and Gibson combine, very beautifully, realism with
somance and beauty. Ma8efield’^ poetry is masked with a strong
feeling for realism, and sometimes it becomes coarse and brutal,
agly and sordid.

* Grierson & Smith— A Critical History of English Poetry.

( 581 )

Lilocs like s

77/ bloody him a bloody fix
ril bloody burn his bloody ricks

disfiguce his verses. But strangely enough, this poet of realism
is also a romanticist and a lover of beauty, and glimpses of both
of romance and beauty are discernible in his poems like The Seekers
and Cargoes :

That beauty I have sought

In women* s heart Sy friends^ in many a place

In barren hours passed at grips with thought.

Beauty of women^ comrade, earth and sea.

Incarnate thought came face to face with me.

Love poetry, too, is attempted by Masefield but there is a note
of sadness in his vision of love He secs the beloved in her coffin
or in her grave, as in Waste, The Watch in the Wood znd When
Bony Death. His mind never seems to forget that
Death has a lodge in lips as red as cherries.

Death as a mansion in the Yew-tree berries.

Masefield is the laureate of the sea and few poets have been
able to capture the atmosphere of the sea, the ships, and sailors
as vividly and realistically as he has done in Dauber & Sea-Fever.
He knows the sea and ships.

Masefield’s love for Nature and the country side is well
presented in Reynard the Fox and Right Royal. He loves the
English landscape and although no part of his poetry deals
directly and primarily with the cultivation of the soil, it gives a
many sided picture of rural England.

Masefield’s philosophic thought runs thcough his poetry.
He has leaning towards Pantheism —

There is no God ; but we, who breathe the air.

Are God ourselves, ond touch God everywhere.

He believes in the immortality of the Soul— >

I hold that when a person dies
His soul returns again to earth.

Masefield presents the tragedy of life, bit he bows ceveteo'
tly at its grandeur and its greatness.

Masefield’s poetry suffers from many faults— a coarse
bstttal realism expressed in slangy and violent phraseology and an

( 582 )

occasional over emphasis. His genius has a mixture of jeurna.
lism in it But on the whole Masefield’s contribution has been
substantial and he deserves all praise for his narrative poems,
his demorcatic feeling of sympathy, his love for nature, and his
appreciation for the country side.

Walter De La Mare ( 1873— )

Among the distinguished poets of the Georgian period
Walter De La Mare stands on a high pedastal. He is essentially
the laureate of the fairy land, creating in his poetry a world of
dreams, fantasies and imagination appealing to children as well
as to grown up people. In The Listeners and Other Poems (1912)
Peacock Pie (1913) The Fleeting and Other Poems (1933) Collected
Poems (1902 — 18) Poems for Children (1930) Bells and Grass
(1941) The Burning Glass and Other Poems (1945) The Traveller
(1946) we have the best of Walter De La Mare’s poetic
genius.

Walter De La Mare is, in the words of Theodore Maynard,
‘‘formally and by profession a children’s poet.” He has very
successfully captured the spirit of childhood in his Songs of
Childhood and his poems remind the reader of the work of Blake,
Coleridge, Tagore, and W. B. Yeats. He has captured the joys
and the pleasures of child life. In his later volumes, the simple,
innocent joys of childhood are marred by the regrets and thwar-
tings of manhood. But inspite of the note of sadness, Walter De
La Mare in his Peacock Pie and Come Hither continues to be a
childhood with such vivideess and insight as De La Mare has
done in his poetry. His child poetry exhibits an astonishing
variety. It contains nursery rhymes, stoiies and songs.

Walter De La Mare’s child-poetry confirms the opinion of
Df. Collins “that the psychological insight of the poet is of the
subtlest, and that a fine intellect partners the imagination of
childhood” His vision of childhood is coloured by the inmgi-
QitioD and intellect of a grown up adult, and as such bis poems
provide joy to children as well as to grown up persons. Charming
ionoceoce is not the whole content of Peacock Pie or any other
of De La Mare's book. There is also something of the adult’s
vision in his poems of child-life.

, ; Another distinguishing feature of Dc La Mare’s poetry fs

( 583 )

the note of fantasy and dreaminess. He is the laureate of the
fairy land. Paiiies, phantoms and mysterious presences haunt
his poems. He does not deal with the problems of life, but
seeks to escape from them in the world of childhood, and fairies.
In the words of Shanks, **(ie is the poet of lost paradises. Almost
all his poetry expresses dissatisfaction with his world, with this
life, and a straining towards something more to be desired.’’
“Moonlight, quietness, mystery and magic envelop his poems.
His poetry moves *out of the dream of wake’ into the dream of
sleep. The world in which he seeks to move is not the world of
hard rugged realities, but a world, ^pieced together by the imagi-
nation of childhood, made up of childish memories of fairy tales
ballads, and nursery rhymes.”

The charm of Walter De Le Mare’s poetry lies in suggest-
ing an atmosphere of weirdness and uncannincss — an atmosphere
of the supernatural and the world of dreaminess. In The Listners
and The Mocking Fairy the fine atmosphere of stillness and quiet-
ness of moonlit night has been created.

Walter De La Mare’s lyrics and the melody of his verses
are captivating. He preferred lyric to epic poetry. “Why write
epics, when a lyric may equally well suggest the boundless and
inexhaustible immensity of the works of God ?

The poetry of Walter De La Mare is marked with a note
of wistfulness and sadness. He knows that beauty and love fade,
and that human life is transient and passing :

Beauty vanishes^ beauty passes^

However rare — rare it be.

But De La Mare derives some consolation in the thought
that 'when the rose fades its memory may still dwell on.’ The
single individual may die and his beauty may end, but the beauty
of Nature will continue to hold us in thrall.

Walter De La Mare is a master artist and a superb craftsman
in verse. His verses have a cadence and subtlety of rhythm which
iitiger, rise and fall like the tremulous fall of a s^now- flake. All
this wizardry of music and technical perfection is achieved without
the least sign of artifice or labour. It has the ease and effortlessness
of the highest art.

( 584 )

EdmvDd Blunden (1896)-*

Edmund Blunden is essentially a poet of nature and pastotal
life. is primarily a pastoral poet, seeking inspiration in the

sights^ sounds and smells of the English countryside, subjects
which he has handled with a Shelleyan lucidity and a technical
subtlety which has yet allowed the authentic rural spirit to shine
through his verse.*' In his early verses he had the gifts of the
Georgians but later on his opinion reacted against the Georgian
school as a whole. He started writing about the horrors of war.
But later on he again turned his gasse back to tb^ peace and beauty
of nature. His best work is to be found in English Poems (1925)
Poems (1930,40) Shells by a Stream (1944) After the Bombing
(1948). His poems of English country-side are to be seen in
The Face of England (1932) English Villages (1941), Cricket
Country (1944). For him as for Keats, “The poetty of Barth is
never dead."

Lascelles Abercrombie (1881 — 1938)

“Abercrombie was one of the original contributors to
Georgian Poetry and, though his work reflected at various times
his interest in nearly all the major writers from Tennyson to
Bridges, his greatest enthusiasm was for the blend of the emotional
and Intellectual which he found in the poets of the metaphysical
school." He presented in his poetry metaphysical and spiritual
problems in a manner which failed to grip the attention of the
teader. He expressed his thoughts in a compressed and somewhat
angular blank verse, making excursions often into the dramatic
monologue. He had metrical skill and command of rhythmic
harmonies, but with all these be could not be popular. “He bad
not the qualities to make him either truly great or widely popular,
and it is, perhaps, significant that we find him devoting most of
his last twenty years of his life mainly to literary criticism."

James Elroy Flecker (1884 — 1915)

The main bulk of Flecker’s poetry is to be found in The
Bridge of Fire (1907), The Last Generation (1908), Forty Two
Poems (1911), The Golden Journey (1913), The Old Ships (1915),
The Burial in England God Save the King (1915).

Flecker, who became famous by his poetic drama Hassan
is essentially the poet of the Bast dwelling in the world of orien-^

( 585 )

tal gcandeuc and magnificence. His mental affinities were
oriental and his craving for the east was a part of his poetic
nature. He was enthralled by the exotic novelty and illusive
romanticism of the east. He captures the east in its coloured and
voluptuous side but he does not commit the mistake of being too
serious. He takes everything with a certain gaiety and irony. **In
my exotic poems” he says, feel that there should be a most
vigilant humour in the poem and parade of nicely chosen words.”

Flecker is the master of jewelled phrase and gem-like verse
and succeeds in capturing the gorgeousness of the east in the
golden panopoly of his words. ^^He delights in the very names of
exotic things and distant places, and master as he is of dazzling
phrase and supple rhythm, he seldom fails to evoke an answering
delight in the reader.”*

Ralph Hodgson ( 1871— )

The poetical output of Ralph Hodgson is not very large,
though the little that he has produced is impressive. He has a very
high conception of poetry and does not desire to make poetry a
source of living. His works include The Bull (1913) Eve and
other Poems (1913), The Song of Honour (1913), Poems (1917).

Hodgson’s ideal of poetry is very high. He has taken to
poetry in the spirit of a dedicated poet and whatever has
come out of his pen is of a high order. There is little dross
in his work.

There are two prominent qualities in Hodgson’s works. He
has an intense love for outdoor life, and an intense love for
animals particularly bulls, birds and dogs. In his poetry the love
for animals comes out directly from his heart In The Bells of
Heaven and The Bull we find Hodgson at his best voicing his pro-
test against all those who cruelly treat animals and subject them
to inhuman hardships of the circus. The Song of Honour reveals
Hodgson as a deep and intense religious poet. The whole creation
is pressed into singing adoration to God. The living and non-
living all join in the chorus of applause and praise the Creator.

Hodgson’s purely descriptive poems, though entirely object-
ive, show a deep strain of reflection. We admire his power to

* Gerald BuUett t M^ern English Poetry.

( 586 )

visualize and make us see the pictute he is dtawiog. This is best
illustrated in The Bull. So consummate is this power of descrip-
tion and visualization that we do not worry about any lapses
with which he may be suffering. **So consummate is this power
of visualization” says Mary C Sturgeon, *^chat it dominates
other qualities and might almost cheat us into thinking that
they do not exist.”

W.W. Gibson (1878— )

W. W. Gibson is a prolific writer and his main work as a
poet is found in Collected Poems (1905—^25) covering nearly 800
pages. His other volumes of poetry ace The Golden Helm (1903),
The Note of Love (l90S).Stone‘Fields (1907), Daily Bread (1910),
Fires (1912), Thoroughfares (1914), Borderland Battle (1915),
Likelihood (1917), Home and h/eighbours (1920), T heard a Siilor
(1925), The Golden Broom (1928) and Hazards (1930).

The poetic career of Gibson broadly falls into three divi-
sions. In his early works before the publication oi Daily Bread
(1910), there is an air of comanticism. The poet roams in the
world of fables and romances and his muse is preoccupied
with Arthur, Helen of Troy, the dim moonlight of lomance and
chivalry :

I sang of lovers and she praised my song
The while the king looked on her with cold eyes.

Soon a change came in the life of the poet and he emerged
from the world of romance to immerge in the strife of industrial
and realistic life. The second period of Gibson’s poetie career
is that of a realist interested not in romance and supernaturalism,
but in the problems of industrial life and factory workers, miners,
stokers and chimney sweepers. He exhibits a rare imaginative
intimacy with the ardours and austerities of low life lived close to
the earth. In the poems published in Daily Bread there is an air
of grimness and bleakness. The poet is face to face with the grim
world of reality, desolate with the ravages of industrialism. He
discovers in the Hie of the workers and the toilers a spirit of true
heroism. He finds courage in the lives of factory girls^ stone-
breakers, printers, fishermen and labourers —

All life moving to one measure —

Daily bread, daily bread-^

( 587 )

Bread of life and bread of labour
Bread of bitterness and bread of sorrow^

Hand- to-mouth and not to-morrow.

Death for housemate, death for neighbour.

The desite fot lealism is evident in the changed style and
veisification of the poet. Instead of dazzling flight of song and
melodious use of soft words, we have short, unrhymed, ejaculat-
ory lines, rising and falling from turgent torrents into sobhinj.'
melody.

The tone of harshness and bitterness, realism and bleakness
once agiin changes into mellowness and cheertulness in the third
period of Gibson’s poetic career. “The spirit of this later work
remained humanitatiao, but it is not centred solely upon the
tiagic aspects of the worker’s lives. A wider range is taken and
comedy enters with an accession of urbanity from which the poem
gains a mellower note. The world of nature too, banished for
a time in the exclusive study of humanity returns to enrich this
pociiy.”*

In short, Gibson’s poetry reveals three phases and three
stages. The first is imitative and pseudo-Tennysonian, the second
is noted for its stern realism mingled with a feeling of humani-
tarianism and sympathy for the poor and humble folk of the
n odern industrial age, the last is characterised by mellowness and
philosophic serenity rising out of his observation of human life. It
is, however, by the work of his second period, that Gibson will
be remembered in the future a^e to come.

W. H. Davies (1879— W40).

W. H. Davies reveals himself in The Autobiography of a
Super Tramp (1908). He tells us that it was after the loss of a leg
while attempting to board a train that he turned to poetry fot a
living and produced a few volumes of verses, which caught the
public eye. Among his volumes of verses ate The Soul’s Destroyer
ana Other Poems (1905). New Poems (1907), Collected Poems
(1916, 1928, 1934) and Love Poems (1935).

Davies is essentially lyricism. His lyrics ate short

and spontaneous. With the exce ption of A. E. Housman, mos t

* Miss Maty Sturgeon— Studies of Coutempotary Poets.

< 588 )

of Davies’s poems ate probably shotter than those of any othei
tnodein writer. Out of 400 poems in Collected Poems^ two hun-
dred and seventy are of three stanzas or less. Much of Davies’s
lyricism is marked with ‘spontaneous outflow/ though in some
poems the lyric impulse is not very strong.

Davies is the poet of Nature and pastoral life. He presents
the sights and scenes of nature, as well as the innocent country
people living in the rural areaf* The poet has succeeded in creating
a a^orld of vivid amazement and intense joy, a world of sunrises,
cows and sheep, owls and cuckooes, butterflies and squirrels in
his poetry. He is himself happiest as a nature-poet —

Call me a nature poet, nothing more
Who writes of simple things, not human evil.

Davies is not a very accurate, precise and scientific observer
of Nature. He does not seek to portray Nature with the eye of
a scientific observer. He realises his weakness and states —

Let others praise thy parts, sweet Nature, I

Who cannot know the barley from the oats

Nor call the bird by note, nor name a star

Claim thy hearPs fullness through the face of things*

Davies makes mistakes in describing and presenting the
seasons of ,.the year, their flora, and fauna, but underlying his app-
reciation of nature we can feel the zest of his heart —

A rainbow and a cuckooes song
May never come together agai i
May never come
This side the tomb.

Davies is not mystical and metaphysical in his approach
to nature. He is not concerned with di^irovering any philosophy
or system behind the scenes of nature. He simply presents the
sights of nature in their freshness. “While Walter De La Mare**
says Robert Lynd, “has the genius for making us look on lovely
things as though for the last time, Mr. Davies has the gift for
osaking us look at 'them, as if for the first time.*'

There is a note of fender sympathy in Davies’s poems
dealing with animals; children and grown up people. He has a
tense of the tramp’s comradeship with the horse, the cow, the
sheep, the cuckoo and the. butterfly (Cf. Nature's Friend^ The

( 589 )

Butterfly, In May, Early Morn).

He pcescQts the hardship of the uoemployed and overwork*
cd poof people and speaks of them with real feeling.

Davies’s c//iM Poetry is fairly attractive though we do not
come across in his child- poems the wonder of Walter Dc La
Mire's dreamland. Davies writes of a happy child, the weeping
child, and the sick child. The dramatic surprise that greets us
at the end of The Two Children brings home to our mind the
irony and sadness of childhood’s illusions.

There are touches of gloominess and despair in Davies*
poetry, but generally speaking the air of pleasantry and joy perva-
des his poetry. The rapture of Davies’s songs is as fresh as that
of his favourite thrush. A genuine spontaneity is the secret of
much of his appeal :

Come, let us laugh — though there's no wit to hear.

Come, let us sing — though there's no listner near;

Come, let us dance, though none admire our grace.

And be the happier for a private place.

Davies has penned a few love poems but they arc of ths
sens e. He has little spirituality in conjuring up Platonic visions of
love. He is content to idolize his beloved who prefers to stay at
home rather than move out to exotic lands. He has all praise for
“sweet stay-at home, sweet well content."

Davies’s poems are *‘a miracle of simplicity and artlcssocss.
There is the lask of depth and profundity in his poetry

' This Davies has no depth.

He writes of birds, of staring cows and sheep.

And throws no light on deep eternal things.

His poetry suffers from many faults — banalities of thought
sod emotion, occasional bathos, defective technique, bad rhymes,
tepetition, lack of intellectual force, absence at a message but
.with all his faults we love him and like to read his lyrics, for in
their restrained simplicity and artless spontaneity, they remind
of Wocthswotth and; Herrick.

Edward: rhomas (1878— 1917)-

Edward Thomas is essentially a poet of nature tnd resem-
bles the Georgians in his love for the countryside and natural
Mmplicity. He sings of the objects of English countryside and

( 590 )

sincerely presents his subtle reactions to nature as well as to
modern life. *^The sense of ^newness’ given by his poetry came
from a feeling that it was written by one whose vision and music
were free from glints and echoes of other's work He sang as
though he were ihe first and only poet, and there was a curious
absence of conscious literary effort in his choice of material.”*
•lobn Drinkwater (1882—1937).

John Drinkwatcr’s poetry in Collected Poems (1923—1937 •
reveals him as an intellectual poet interested not in lyrics and
songs but in elegiac, meditative and harlatoiy verse. His poems in
Poems of Men and Hour (1911), Poem^ of Love and Earth (1912),
exhibit his gravity and earnestness, his sanity and rigorous
discipline. He presents the puritan spirit of mid-England in his
poetry. He is a self conscious artist, and pens his lines in the *cold
ink of thought,’ rather than in the, ^rcd blood of a fired brain.’
*His work is always controlled in emotion and expression. Then:
is little of the /fir or poetlcus^ and his language and imagery shows
him to be a deliberate, careful craftsman of rather limited gifts.'
His imagery shines not as a star or a flower but like a jewel, a
priceless gem of arc **He speculates, meditates, ruminates, but
only rarely illuminates, other than as the glow-worm illuminates
hiu self and his own surroundings.”**

John Drinkwatcr will be remembered for his nature poetry.
He represented and celebrated "the English countryside, its
streams and pools and woods, its birds and cattle and flowed,
its shepherds and gypsies, with a cultured pastoral fancy uncroab-
led by any urgencies.” Only Shanks among the Georgians stands
out the compeer of Drinkwatei in the appreciation of nature and
tie countryside.

Alfred Noyes (1880—1958).

Alfred Noyes is a distinguished poet of the Georgian school.
It was recorded that Noyes was *the only modem poet who could
make poetry even the epic play.’f The first volume of his poetry
came out in 1902 when he was twenty two years of age. In 1914
was published his famous twelve-book epic Drake. In 1920 his

* A. C. Ward : Twentieth Century Literature.

** Coulson Keroahao : Six Famous Living Pdets.
t Manly & Ricket x Cootempori^ay British Literature.

( 591 )

Collected Poems tG^ched 2 , third volume. His Tales of Mermtid
Tavern had a peculiar fascination for young readers.

**The main difference between Alfred Noyes and the other
duller of the Georgians is that their stock was smaller and more
pretentious than his» and that they cried their wares mote lustily,
tie lingered in the declining Victoiian twilight, they belonged to
the Georgian false dawn."*

Noyes had a fascination for the brave Elizabethan world,
and produced a heroic account ot the exploits of the age in
Drake and called back prominent Elizabethan figure's to poetic
life in Tales of the Mermaid Tavern. “In all, the muse of Alfred
Noyes was at once serious with big high purpose and alive with
high spirits and humour, robust and delicate, real and fantastic.
Ears that later learnt other and less tuneful music turned against
his varied and catching melodies, just as his love of colour and of
adjectives and his often care free spontaneity later pained a more
austere taste."**

Harold Monro (1879-1932).

The poetry of Hacold Monro who made his Poetry Book
Shop in Bloomsbury “is more urban and realistic than that of the
other Georgians. He attempted more strenuously than they to
poeticize the circumstances of modern life, and, although, his
vein is a shallow one, he worked it with vigour and honesty. More
than any other Georgian, he felt the need for a renovation of the
technique of poetry. The realistic element in the diction of much
post war verse owes much to Munre’s early experiments in such
volumes as Real Property (1922), The Earth for Sale (1928)."t
K. Chesterton (1874 - 1936).

G. K, Chesterton was a man ^f versatile genius and signa-
ii6ed his career as a journalist, pamphleteer, biographer, historian,
novelist, short story writer and poet. “Of the several volumes of
poetry which he published it suffices to say that they contain more
verse than poetry** and there is a general absence of depth in what
he has left behind. His collections of verse include The iViid
Knight and Other Poems (1900)f The Ballad of White Horse (1911),

* Df.iA, S. Collins : English Literature of the 20th Century.

** A. C. Ward : Twentieth Century Literature,
t Moody & Lovett : A History of English Literature.

( 592 )

Wine^ Water and Song ^{1915)^ Points (1915), The Ballad of Sr
Barbara (1922) and Collected Poems (1933).

Chesteiton’s poettj reveals his religions fervour and his
moralistic vein. He was not one of those poetf who ^roce merely
foi the glorification of art. He did not belong to the school of
'Art for Art’s sake.’ He was a devout Roman Catholic and in his
poetry there are solemn and serious touches of religion. He
brought the spirit of Catholicism in English poetry particularly
in his hymns and war ballads.

**Tbe best- section of G. K. Chesterton’s verse is the group
of road- songs and drinking-songs scattered through the novel
The Flying Inn and Wine^ Water and Songs. Their combination of
wisdom and nonsense, humour and high spirits is irresistible and
unique and these (together with one impressive ‘serious’ lyric
Donkey) const itue Chesterton’s indispensable contribution to Eng-
lish poetry.”* Chesterton has left behind a number of beer-songs,
parodies and satires. These poems lack spontaneity and refine-
ment but they are racy and jolly fine. His parodies entitled
Answers to the Poet are delightfully humorous, and the journalis-
tic note in some of them makes them quite piquant and sharp.

Chesterton will go down to posterity by his war poetry.
The balUds, and war poems such as Lepanto^ The Ballad of St.
Barbara, The Ballad of White Horse are stirring poems and have
the martial twinkle and twang about them. These poems abound
in dramatic descriptions of characters and incidents. The narra-
tion is vigorous and effective.

Chesterton may be lacking in the exquisite metrical artistry
and inventiveness of Walter De La Mare, *tbe butterfty genius* of
William Henry Davies, or the refined native crudity of his friend
Hillaire Belloc, but be will safely go down to posterity as a greai
poet by bis fervent hymns and spirited war-ballads, ^s unconven-
tional perhaps, as his personal appearance with ‘unkempt curl^
hair, shaggy reddish brown moustache and hii careless clothes.
As a journalist or a writer of fine paradoxes he may cootinue tc
captivate a vast majority of thoughtless readers, but nothing car
ifye us a truer glimpse of his greatness as a man than bis slipsb|Dd

C Ward : Twentieth Century Uterature.

( 593 )

bold and outspoken poetry exulting in the triumphant vision of
Christianity, which bears an unmistakable impression of his
vigorous personality.*'*

Chcsterton*s friend Hillaire Belloc (1870-1953) wrote
poems, and "the poetry of both of them was characterised by its
love of God and its love of earth, by romantic idealism and an
ironic laughter at comtemporary follies, by the praise of wine and
by the understanding of children.**** Belloc’s nature poems
particularly the lyrics of The South Country and his satirical and
moralistic Cautionary Tales for Children, arc particularly delight-
ful and proclaim him as a lover of nature, children, religion and
moral life.

Q. 128. Write a note on the Imagists as a reaction to the
Georgians.

Ans. In the years immediately preceding the first World
War there were a few pcets who started a reaction against
Georgian poetry, which they criticised as facile and loose* appeal-
ing to the general public fighting shy of modernism. These
reactionaries called themselves Imagists, and they kept before
them the object of representing real life in images that were clear,
precise and exact. The leader of this school T. E. Hulme
(1833 — 1917) insisted that, "poetry should restrict itself of the
world perceived by the senses, and to the presentation to its themes
in a succession of concise, clearly visualized, concrete images
accurate in detail and precise in significance.”f The Imagists
aimed "at hard, clear, brilliant effects instead of the soft, dreamy
vagueness or the hollow Miltonic rhetoric of the English Nine-
teenth Century tradition.’’^ They aimed at the clarity and concent
ration of the classic Chinese lyric and the Greek epigram. The
Imagists defined poetry "as the presentation of a visual situation
in the fewest possible concrete words, lightened of the burdens of
conventional adjectival padding, and unhampered by general
ideas or philosophical or moral speculations.*' For the expression

* Dr. R. A, Misra : Chesterton, The Poet.

** Dr. A. S. Collins : English Literature of the 20th Century,
t B. Albert : A History of English Literature,
i V. D. S. Pinto : Crisis in Modern Poetry.

( 594 )

of theic thoughts they evolved new thythms and laid particular
emphasis on verse libre. The Imagists wanted to create a very
precise and concentrated expression of a new sort of consciousness
for which the traditional techniques were inadequate^ and naturally
he made experiments in verse libre which provided them unltmited
freedom of free expression. The new rhythms of the Imagists bore
a close affinity to those of everyday speech and were far away
from conventional verse patterns.

Hulme’s leadership was followed in America and H. D.
(Hilda Doolittle) and . Ezra Pound adopted the new
technique which Pound characterised as Imagism. The Imagists
brought out a magazine The Egoist^ and later on published three
volumes of Imagist Poetry and published an anthology of Imagist
poetry called Des Imagistes in (1914). The main contributors were
F. S. Flint, Richard Aldington, F. M. Hulffer, Amy Lowell and
O. H. Lawrence.

Imagism could not cut much ice. **The limitation of Imagism
was that it concentrated too exclusively on a new technique^
holding that the subject was relatively unimportant.”* *^Tbe
pursuit of the sequence of very concise images and the use of verse
libre often led to obscurity and licence, and the movement was
strongly criticised and quickly died out. Yet Hulme’s conception of
the clearly visualized; concrete image is one of the most distinctive
underlying ideas of later poetry, and its effect is seen particularly
clearly in the work of T. S Eliot and the poets of the Thirties”**
‘^Imagism did modern poetry a tremendous service by pointing
the way to a renovation of the vocabulary of poetry and to the
necessity of ridding poetic technique of vague and empty verbiage
and dishonest and windy generalities.” f

The following poem Garden by H. D. will give to the reader
an idea of Imagist poetry —

O wind, rend open the hearty
Cut apart the heat.

Rend it to tatters.

Fruit cannot drop,

* Dr, A. S. Collins : English Literature of the 20th Century.

** B. Albert : A History of English Literature,
t Moody-Lovett : A History of English Literature.

( 595 )

Through this thiek air.

Cut the heat.

Plough through it.

Turning it on either side of your path.

Q. 129. Write a note on The Poetiy of the Great War of
(1914—1919) and evaluate the work of the Soldier Poets

Ans. The Great Wat of (1914 — 1918) exercised a consi-
derable influence on English poetry of the Georgian Period. The
poetry produced by the Wat was not all of a single note. While we
heat laudatory verses coming out from eider poets who stayed at
home, we are shocked by the note of cynicism, satire and realism
struck by poets who had actually been to the war field and had
witnessed the hoi tots of warfare.

Thosfe who wrote gloriously of war and patriotism, of
sacrifice and victory, were the elder poets : Kipling, Freeman,
Hardy and Lawrence Binyon. These poets sang of the nobility of
self sacrifice and the sublimity of patriotism. They regarded war
as a call to doty and a time of trial for the nation.

Kipling was among the leaders of the glotifiers of war. In
his famous poem For Alt ^e Have and We Are, he exhorted the
people of his country to be patriotic and hail war with enthu-
siasm —

There is but one task for all
One life for each to give.

Who stands if Freedom fall ?

Who dies if England lives.

John Freeman struck the note of optimism and hope in the
poem Happy is England Now, and he left elated in presenting the
match of soldiers to the war. He wrote —

There is not anything more wonderful.

Than a great people moving towards the deep.

Of an unguessed and uuf eared future.

Lawrence Binyon, like John Freeman, thought of the glories
of war and prayed to the Spirit of England in The Fourth of
August :

Enkindle this dear ewth that bore us.

( 596 )

In the hour of peri I purified.

Binyon felt exalted at the thought :

We step from days of our division^

Into the grandeur of our fate*

Hardy and Alice Meynell, Bridges and John Masefield ^cre
also moved to write about the war and its future prospects. But it
was the young soldier poet Rupert Brooke (1887 — 1915) who
gave expression to the fervent hopes of the people for the
war in his sonnets particularly the Soldier which has been consi*
dered as a masterpiece of patriotic fervour. Before writing
poems on the war, Rupert Brooke was interested in expressing
disgust and dislike for artifices of the eighteen- nineties group
of writers. He quickly reacted against the vitiated hot house
atmosphere of the Decadents and wallowed in ugliness in order
to demonstrate his distaste for pretty poetry.” He represented
ugly scenes marked with a note of blatant realism. Describing the
state of the two passengers in a train, Brooke wrote —

Opposite me two Germans sweat and snore
One of them wakes, and spits and sleeps again.

Brooke scoffed at the romantic view of heroes and hero-
ines in Menelans and Helen, and drew the auention of his readers
to the beauties of Nature and realities of life. In The Old
Vicarage Grantchester, Brooke presented his love for Nature
without any colour of mysticism and metaphysical subtlety. In
The Great Lover he wrote of the hundred and one things of ordi-
nary day to life, such as plates and cups, dust, wet roofs, wood-
smoke, which provided him interest and joy.

When the war came in 1914, Brooke hailed it with enthu-
siasm. He wrote fine war sonnets exhibiting his enthusiasm and
noble resolve to serve his country. He looked upon the war as
a glorious adventure and welcomed the call to action with joy —
Now, God be thanked who has matched its with this

hour.

And caught out .i outh and wakened us from sleeping.

With hand mad . sure, clear eye, and sharpened power.

To turn, and swi tmers into cleanness leaping
Glad from a wot I grown old and cold tmd weary*

( 597 )

In another poem he wrote —

Honour has come back, as a king, to earth
And paid his subjects with a royal wage\

And nobleness walks in our ways again
And we have come into our heritage.

Rupert Brooke was killed in action on St. George's day
1915, and in popular imagination he was ^nontzed. ‘‘It is natural,
though unprofitable, to speculate as to what might have been
Rupert Brooke's place in English poetry if he had lived on. The
marks of greatness in his poems arc few, but such marks there
are. He saw the world with a clear eye and recorded what he saw
with directness and clarity. Yet, however, poetic in himself,
Rupert Brooke was more important as the occasion ot poetry
in others ; though the war-time revival of English poetry^ had its
origin in Brooke atone.

The first phase of war-poetry mostly eulogising war and
harping on the note of patriotic sacrifice for the nation passed
away as soldiers, who had been to the war, returned to England to
horrify people with their brutal war experiences. In the poetry
of the soldier- poets who have personal experience of the war; wc
hear undertones of the ravages and horrors of war tn terrif> ing
words.

Siegfried Sassoon (1886— )

He was the first great soldier-poet who revealed the horrors
and ugliness of war. He presented in his verse the ghastly and
terrible realities ol the trenches, and recounting his own experi-
ences, admonished the people to stop var. HLe tailed to convince
the war lords of the futility of war and gradually became resigned
and re-enlisted himself in the army. In Sassoon's war poetry wc
come across the horrors and ugliness of war in a blatant way. The
poems in Counter Attack bring out the horrors of war in a terri-
fying manner. Here is one picture drawn by Sassoon :

The place was rotten with dead, green clumsy legs
High-booted, sprawled and grovelled along the caps
And trunks face, downward in the sucking mud.

Wallowed like trodden sand^bags loosely filled,

* A. C Ward : Twentieth Century Literature.

( 598 )

And na^ed sodden buUocks^ mats of hair.

Bulged clotted heads slept in the plastering slime

gcDeral Sassoon’s mood was to convey the bittet
tiuth, to teat off mask from the ugly face of reality, and to wreak
bis anger on the heartless and the hypocrites.”* Only in one
poem Everyone Sang there is the absence of horror and the biu*
tality of war. *This poem is perhaps, the only beautiful and clean
bit of verse which the war produced.*

Robert Graves (1895 ) *

Graves was horrified by the ravages of the war and his
inner personality recoiled from the beastiness and spiritual waste
produced by the war. He thought more of the countryside and
the beautiful world which lay outside the battlefield than of the
actual war. ^^Purely as a war poet he did not attain to considerable
stature.”

Robert Nicholas (1893— )

Nicholas is a rhetorician and a spendthrift of genius
scattering his verses with a lavish hand. His war poems ace
wordy rather than substantial. But at places three is vigour and
directness, which, in spite of its bluntness, seems quite refreshing.
Here are a few lines —

Revolver levelled quick
Flick ; Flick ;

Red as blood.

Germans^ Germans.

Good^ O Good /

Coo/, Madness.

Wilfred Owen (1893—1918).

Owen was inspired by Sassoon to write war poems in nis
ColUcted Poems. In the Preface to this collection he wrote— “I
am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is war, and the pity
of war. The poetry is in the pity.” In the war poems of Owen
the pity of war is poignantly and touchingly presented. •‘Never
has the pity of war” says Albert, ‘'been more deeply felt or
more powerfully shown. Though his satire is often sharp, be
never loses his artistic poise, and bis most bitter work has a

* Dr. A. S. Collins : English Literature of the 20th Century.

( 599 )

dignity which is truly great- ‘'In his popular poem Strange
Meeting the pity of war is brought out touchingly. Two
soldiers belonging to opposite sides meet after death and
they both deplore the bjirbarism and tragic waste of
war fare.

Owen had a good command of rhythm and was a ceaseless
experimenter in verse techniques. He introduced para- rhyme and
prepared the way for subsequent poets to follow the innovations in
rhyming

Julian Grenfell (1888—1915)

Grenfell was a soldier on active service in France^ but
instead of dealing with the horrors of war, he chose to write of
tranquillity in the midst of turmoil and confusion. This serene
mood of the poet is reflected in Into Buttle. His poetry presents
‘^a calm communion with unwaclike things. In the midst of fire
he could withdraw into himself and find solace, harmony, and
fellowship with earth and trees and the grass, with stars and
birds and horses

Gcentell preserved his spiritual certiutde and moral courage
in the midst of warfare and his greatness lies in keeping aloft the
tone of nobility and spirituality in the midest of war.

Edmund Blunden (1896 — |

Blundeo, the poet of nature and pastoralism, was deeply
agonised by the horrors of war and expressed his resentment in
his book Undertones of War. His war poems have less pungency
than those of either Owen or Sassoon. He could not present
the ugly experiences of war with the same vigour and lore as
his compeers.

Among the Georgian poets who wrote about war, reference
to J. C. Squire's To A Bulldog, Maurice Baring’s To The Memory
of Lord Lucas and A. E. Housman’s Epitaph on an Army of
Mercenaries is necessary. These poets were non combatants but
they could produce elegiac verses on the war and succeeded in
bringing out the weariness and madness of trench-fighting and the
life of the soldiers on the battlefield.

* A, C Ward<--»Twentieth Century Literature.

( 6n(» )

Q. 130. Give a brief account of English poetry between
(1920—30) and critically examine the works and the contri-
bntiiiii of the prominent younger poets of this period.

OR

“It would be bard to dispute that in this decade. 41920—
]93<0 the poets who led the vanguard of poetry were T. S
Eliot and Edith Sitwell.” Examine this statement
critically.

Ans. English poetry between (1920—1930) presents the
fine spectacle of old traditional poets moving steadily by the
side of the younger poets. Tradition and experiment go hand
in hand during this period. “To thjsc who lived in the twenties,
however, the poetic stage appeared far more crowded, and merely
to ei umerate some of the other principal poets shows how various
were the kinds of poetry written and admired.” The old poets
who were keeping to the wearied and well trodden path of tradi-
tional poetry were Hardy, Bridges, Davies, Walter De La Mare,
A. E. Housman, Gibson, Masefield and Bottomlcy. Though
Georgian Poetry ceased to appear after 1922, others of its poets,
such as Dtinkwater, Shanks, W. J. Turner and their leader J. C.
Squire were still holding the stage. Alfred Moyes was adding to
his songs and ballads the epical history of science fn The
Tort-h Bearers.

The new poets who had not yet opened their account in
the field of literature were gradually gaining prominence, and
among the new adventurers in the realm of poetry were T. S. Eliot,
Edith Sitwell, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell, Richard Church,
Herbert Palmer, and Victoria Sackville-Wcsi. Humbert Wolfe ‘'and
Roy Campbell were other prominent figures among the young
generation of new poets. And then at the end of the decade there
appeared the new constellation of Auden, Spender, C«:il Day
Levis and Mac Neice.

The two great personalities of this decade are undoubtedly
T. S. Eliot and Edith Sitwell, and these two poets revolutionised
the whole concept of poetry by their startling innovations in
matter and new experiments In metre, diction and rhyme, They
deseive special sttuiy io this brief review.

( 601 )

T. S. Ellol

T. S. Eliot an American by birth became a naturalised
Btitish subject in 1927, and his contribution to English poetry,
drama, and criticism has been substantial and solid. Eliot is a
difficult poet to under itand and his poetry, loaded with the weight
ot his stupendous learning and subtle allusiTeness, baffles an
average well informed reader. T. S. Eliot took the profession of
poetry seriously and deliberately set out to make his poetic pro-
duction as hard and rugged as a granite rock. For him poetry is
QOf ‘a spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions’ but a difficult
Alt to follow without proper intellectual equipment in the reader.
The odour of bookishness is everywhere in Eliot’s poetry. He
conceived that a new poet must be, ^‘difficult, more comprehen*
iive, more allusive, more indicect in order to force to dislocate if
accessary, language into his meaning.” To make himself inacessi-
ble to popular comprehension Eliot introduced strange symbols
and images in his poetry. *^He extended the scope of symbolism
TO include the use of partial quotation and of allusion to create
the thought or atmosphere, contrast or illumination, he desired.
With the elusive hint of ten from the depths of learning he rivalled
the later ma^ters of the crossword puzzle, which was another
product of the new mental climate.” He made poetry complea
and confusing by calling back to his mind the images and phrases,
thoughts and ideas of a thousand authors whose work he bad
pillaged and by introducing them without harmony and order in
the tangled skein of his poetic thought. His obsession with the
problem of time, and his strong desire to realise a vision, both
earthly and spiritual, further accentuated the mystifying atmos-
phere of his poetry. The result has been on the whole unfavourable
for the poet, and inspite of the best attempts of critics and
annotators to shed light on Eliot’s poetry, he remains an obscure
and recondite poet.

Formative Influences on T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot was considerably influenced by a number of
wr ters European and Oriental, and by a variety of movements in
ttc world of poetry. He owed a great deal to the French
Symbolist poets, who in their turn were influenced by Edgar
Allen Poe, whose uhlutne has been considered the first great poem

( 602 )

of the symbolist school. The poets of the symbolic school tegarded
poetcy as '^consisting in the musical evocation of moods, vague,
subtle and evanescent. To this end they concentrated on the
suggestive power of word music and on suggestion by means of
association of ideas/’ It was Arthur Symons who familiarised
English poetry with the work of the French Symbolists in his
book The Symbolist Movement of Literature. Eliot studied this
book, and became familiar with the work of the French Symbolists
like Laforgue, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Tritan and Cobieie. He sought
to imitate theic method and manner, their tone and metre in his
poetry.

Donne and the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth
century also exercised a deep influence on f. S. Eliot. *'Donne
gave him examples of the complex and subtle mood poem, at
once intellectual, emotional and physical in its appeal; of striking
imagery and unexpected turns; of rapid transition from image to
image and idea to idea by emotional rather than logical sequence;
of the alliance of levity and seriousness/'* **His major English
progenitor was the seventeenth century poet Donne, from whom
he learned to present antithetical moods in a single poem, the
cultivation of metaphysical conceits, and the use upon occasion
of colloquial rather than literary diction.”** "Eliot it was who
was chiefly instrumental in leading poets back to Donne, and as
an imitator, but as bringing a Donne-like mind and spiritual
apprehension to bear upon the contemporary world, and re*
establishing the 'conceits’ of the mctaphysicals in modern dress.
But whereas Donne’s imagination was invariably passionate and
consuming, Eliot’s was often anaemic and chill.”!

Webster and Tourneur gave Eliot 'the union of thought
and passion, in its dramatic speech rhythm.’ Dante, the great
Italian poet, exercised a profound influence on Eliot. He had a
reverence for Dante’s grand simplicity and the profundity of his
genius. Baudelaire’s influence on Eliot’s imagery can plainly be
,^en. Eliot paid^ tribute to Baudelaire for giving "new possibilities
to poetry in a new stock of imagery of contemporary life.” The

* Dr. A. S. Collins— English Literature of the ZOth Century.

** Moody & Lovett : A History of English Literature,
t A. C. Ward : Twentieth Century literature*

( 603 )

Imagists, too, made thcit contfibacion in the formation of his
style, for he ^^combined their precise little pictures with the vaguer
imagery of the Symbolists/’— These influences worked on T. S,
Eliot’s mi ad and made his poetry *a combination of as many
strands of tradition as possible/

The Main Poetical Works of T. S. Eliot.

The first great work of T. S. Eliot was Love Song of L
Aljred Prufrock. This poem created a stir in the poetical world
of the twenties. Here we clearly notice the influence of Laforgue,
the French symbolist, in the somewhat seif •consciously depressed
tone of the poem. Eliot presents here ^‘the nervous tension and
suppressed hysteria of this world of frustrated, rudderless, cul-
tured, welbto-do people” in a style that at once catches the
reader. J. Alfred Prufrock is a middle aged dilettante. He is feel-
ing the weight oi years. He calls back to his mind his suppressed
yearnings and romantic memories. He is the victim of indecision.
He cannot fulfil his desires and so he laughs ruefully at himself.
There is the woman in Portrait of Lad}» but Prufrock cannot
fulfil himself. Through Prufrock the poet seeks to portray the
emptiness, sordiness and ugliness of modern life. ^*The irregula-
rities of rhyme scheme and line length in his verse torm, the
pressure of his condensed and often vividly contrasted images,
the skilful use oc rhythmic variations and the restrained power of
his style distinguished Eliot as a gifted, original artist” in this
poem.

The Poems (1920) exhibit the same mood. The verse form
is completely changed. Instead of the irregular verse paragraph
we have four-line stanza rhyming abebn The diflicult monologue
Gerontion is couched in the blank verse of the later Elizabethan
dramatists.

The much discussed Waste Land appeared in 19ZZ. Here
as in the early works, Eliot attempted, **to create *a sense of the
sordidness and vulgarity, the moral debility and spiritual desicca-
tion of modern life.” Here we find the same atmosphere of
disillusionment about modern life as in Aldous Huxley’a Point
Counter Point. Here is compressed **thc immense panorama of
futility and anarchy which is contemporary history” **Parcly
through his own emotions, partly through chose of typical figuress

( 604 )

he aiooied at creating, not an objective description^ but a dramatit
self expression of an age of emotional sterility devoid of real
purpose and haunted by fear.” The symbolism of Waste Land is
drawn from the legend of the Holy Grail of a Waste Land, striken
by drought, where everything has become sterile. Based upon
that myth Bliot presents London as a Waste Land. To understand
the poem one has to read two works. Miss Weston’s From Ritual
to Romance and two volumes of Frazer’s The Golden Bought The
poem built roan ( the symbols of drought and flood, represent-
ing death and rebirth. In a series of disconcertingly vivid impre-
ssions, the poem advances by rather abrupt transitions through
five movements — *The Burial of the Dead’, ‘The Game of Chess’,
*The Fire Sermon’, 'Death by Water’, ‘What the Thunder Said.*
The figure of Tiresias provides emotional unity to the poem. The
defect of the poem lies in the fact that it ‘‘concentrates on the
cosmopolitan city dwellers on Suburbia, and the intellegentsia, and
ignores both the life abundant which upheld them, and the vitality,
destructive but strong of his Sweeney type.”

In 1925 appeared The Hollow Men representing the dying
embers of dying civilization. Here are presented —

Stuffed men
Leaning together j
Headpiece filled with straw.

After 1925 the dire:tion of Eliot's poetry changed. He
turned away from satire and criticism ‘to a constructive search
for the truth.’ In Ash' Wednesday (1930) he directed his gaze to
religion and spiritual life. He finds hope in the discipline of the
Christian religion. The poem records “in six movements a spiri-
tual experience beginning with renunciation and ending with the
hope of life renewed.*’ “The six movements alternate between the
sombre and the hopeful. Much of the imagery and the concent-
rated expression makes the intellectual understanding of the poem
very difficult but the colour and life in the imagery and the very
sound and rhythm of the lines convey the spiritual movement to
the reader.V^e The new spiritual change that came over Eliot at
this time is reflected in Jhourney of the Magi commemorating the

f Dr. A. S. Collins : English Literature at the Century*

( 605 )

btfth of Christ. Afariana futthet marks the emcrgeoce of Eliot
from Waste Land into the land of Beulah with a better hope for
mankind. The resurrection of Eliot’s faith is best represented in
Four Quartets appearing separately under Burnt Norton (1936),
East Coker (1940), The Dry Salvages (1941), Little Oidding (1942)*
In these religious poems we become aware of the intensity of
Eliot’s search for religious truth, which leads finally to a new hope
in the Christian idea of rebirth and renewal'*. In these Fou*
Quartets Eliot seeks to solve for himself the problem he had posed
at the end of The Waste Land-how ‘to set my lands in order’. The
Four Quartets are great philosophical odes. They are highly com-
plex in their thought and imagery. 1^ is not an overstatement
when Dr. Collins says that '‘books are necessary for their full
expounding”. These poems are foe learned scholars and not for
the average reader.

Estimate of T. S. Eliot as a poet.

T. S. Eliot is a difficult poet and it is not an easy game to
understand the complexity of his thoughts and the subtlety of his
expression. The amalgam of various stands in his poetry makes
him a hard nut to crack. In his earlier poetry the difficulty matniy
rises due to the technique he adopted for the expression of his
thoughts. A condensed and often oblique expression in which
necessary links arc frequently omitted makes him oSscucc and
ambiguous. In the Waste Land he is extremely allusive and
deliberately vague in the use of symbols and images. The difficulty
of the later poems rises due to the nature of the subjects — **statc8
of mind and experiences incapable of precite formulaiion and
therefore difficult to communicate”. The Four Quartets arc highly
complex philosophical odes needing much illumination and
explanation for their understanding. The major theme of these
philosophical poems is “the antithesis between time and the time-
less, between time and eternity, and the series of poems rises to
its climax in a consideration of the incarnation, the point of
intersection of time and enternity.”

Eliot’s poetry is a kind of spiritual experience a strui^gle of
the soul to pass through the seething strife and turmoil of the
Waste Land to the hope and faith of Ahh Wednesday and the Four
Quartets. His poetry represents the gradual evolution and progress

( 606 )

of bis soul through the suffering of '*(a} the perception of evil,
folly and futility expressed in the Prufrock and Gerontion (b) the
almost hopeless search for spiritual rebirth in the experience of
the Wastelands of past and present (c) the ascent of the hill of
Purgatory and the vision of the Inferno in Ash^ Wednesday and
The Men* The final summing and full sense of spiritual

release is achieved in the Four Quartets.**

Eliot’s poetry v^hile seeking to appeal to emotions is of an
intellectual character. It is written with deliberation and is not the
result of spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. It is loaded
with learning and is heavy with thought. The thinker in Eliot
overpowers the artist and the poet, and the stamp of a highly
subtle and intellectual personality is on every line of the poet. The
odour of bookishness is everywhere in Eliot’s poetry.

Eliot is not a poet of the first order. David Daiches
characterised him in his Delhi Seminar address as ‘*the great
minor poet of the 20th century.” But to call him a minor poet
will not be just. He would be remembered as one of the greatest
renovators of English poetry. **He has given it a new intellectual
dignity, new forms arising out of a new sincerity and a new
spiritual depth. Like Dryden after the Restoration and Words-
worth at the end of the eighteenth century he has also given it a
ntw policy. More than any other poet he has saved it from
becoming a mere past time of the scholarly section of the upper
middle class, like Latin poetry in the days of Claudian and
Ausonious.”*

Edith Sitwell (1887 - )

Edith Sitwell was born in a family, *io which arts were a
living heritage and beauty of every kind was an open book.* She
played an important part in leading the reaction against Georgian
poetry. She was mainly responsible for making traditional
Georgian poetry outmoded. Between 1906 and 1911 she laid the
foundation of Wheels in opposition to Georgian poetry, and
contributed her poems to this new organ. The sixth cycle of
wheels contains a direct attack on J. C Squire and his friends.

The early poetry of Edith Sitwell Glown*s Houses (1918)> The

♦ V, D. S. Pinto : Crisis in Modern Poetry*

( 607 )

Wooden Pegasus (1920), Bucolic Comedies (1923) are in the style
of T« S. Eliot and they are mainly concerned with the futility of
modern life. *^His early poems showed her painfully aware of
the artiCciality of contemporary life and oppressed bv the dust of
mortality.” She represented the tragedy of human life and the
sordidness of modern materialism. Dust and the dry hone come
again and again in her imagery.

The early poems of Edith Sitwell mark her out as an esca-
pist to the world of art and the joys of childhood. Auden later
on found hope from modern materialism into politics, Edith
Sitwell in the world of childhood and art. She was essentiaUy
an artist. **Whether in life or art, she was born above all else
with the soul of an artist bound to strike out as a rebel in
pursuit of her ideals.” Her brother Osbert made the following
observation about Sitwell —

Ascetic artist of the painting word^

Your whole life bent to this one^ selfless cause^

Of netting beauty wi^h a phrase or pause*

Poetic artistry saved her from the materialism of the age.

In these early poems of Edith Sitwell we are impressed
by her style and her vivid imagery. The most distinctive and
notable feature of her style in these early years was her use of
sense impressions. She could successfully impart to one sense
the attributes of another as had been done by Milton in *Blind
mouths’ in Lycidas. We find Edith using such sense impress-
ions as *crakling green,’ ^braying light’. Jangling rain*. He shares
her 'acute and uncovered senses.’ In a single word of brief phrase
she successfully achieves a striking effect, and the vividness of her
imagery and her love of rich colour contribute much to the charm
of her work.

In the later poems of Edith Sitwell we feel a sense of beauty
and human heartedness. Her long poem The Sleeping Beauty,
"is a rare continuity of beauty, highly wrought, glowing with
colour and dazzling with imagery, a beauty existing equally in the
control and harmony of sound, to which she always gave the most
exacting and sensitive craftsmanship.”*

* Dr. A. S. Collins— English Literature of the 20th Century.

( 608 )

The homao beartedness of hex poctty can also be felt in
her later poems such as Rustic Elegies (1927). **Hcr eaxliei
poeexy had been aloof, aiistocxatic, and, a little in bifman, her latea
poetry was compassionate, committed and, in the best sense, tragic.
The suffering and destruction wrought by the war, tbe< revelation
of the evil of which man was capable not only aroused in bet
the r'eepest feelings ot horror and compassion but moved hex
to create in a style appropriate to the expression of great themes
and powerful emotions. Her human beartedness comes out
cspcfially in Four Elegies and Aubade.

Miss Edith Sitwell has been considerably influenced by the
Secord World War and her memorable war poems are Song of the
Cold (1945) and The Canticle of the Sun (1949).

“Later Edith Sitwell developed into one of the major
religic us and metaphysical poets of the period, under the stressful
tod sobering influences of the troubled nineteen thirties and the
ensuirg Second World War. The Song of the Cold (1945) though
containing mainly poems written from 1939 onward, also includes
a nunil er of pieces from her early and middle period, and shows
her i cQgress from the fantastical to the spiritual — a progress
which, in ibe light of her poetry as a whole, can be seen as orderly

tod ii cvitable.”t

Osbitt ^ilwdl (lii9r— - ) and Sacheverdl Sitwell (1897— )

The two brothers of Edith Sitwell are poets or lame, but
they could not achieve the excellence of Edith Sitwell. Osbert
Sitwell was primarily a satirist, and be flashed the sword of his
wit at the old and stupid conventions of the society of his times.
“He flayed with shining whips the money-making philistioes/* In
Greeu Fly )x^ attacked the silly sentimentalism of those who
could cry over a hurt dog when millions met their death in agony
on the battle field. Hit scorn for the anaemic and spineless
people, who were scared oi reality and were insulated by money

and coiAtiition was expressed in Church Farade. He remained a
bitter critic and satirist of his times. He remained a lover of

the cM world and a master of the clarity of expression in his

wtitin|p|y

i Moddy Lovett-^ A- liisioiy of English Literature.

C. Ward— Twentieth Century Literature*

I 609 )

He also produced some successful poems in the iihptetsioo*
istic style. The follo\»iog lines from Giardino Publko exbihit the
varying sensations of heac, coolness and silence —

Petunias in mass fornuUion
An angry rose, a hard carnation
Hot yellow grass, a yellow palm
JHsiifg, giraffe— Idee, into calm,

4U these glare holly into the sun.

Behind' are woods where shadows run
Like water through the dripping shade
That leaves and laughing winds have made
Here sttence like a silver bird
Pecks at the droning heat.

Sac^everell Sitwell was an artist and he “rivalled his sister
in devotion to the artistry of poetry^ sharing her passionate love
of beauty and her eagerness to experiment.’' He wrote poems
ia the lyrical strain about fishermen and ordinary toilers in the
field. His ‘clear lyrical pictures of ordinary life’ are impressive.
One Hundred, and One Harlequins in 1922 breaks a new ground.
Here Sacheverell is a critic of his times. The work .is lit op with
wit and fantasy and brings the contemporary world in its true
colours. Sitwell's Dr. Donne and Gargantua strikes another note,
the note of symbolism, ft portrays, “a contest between good
and evil, between the spiritual and the physical.”

Yktarii SsckviJlfB West.

In Victoria Sackville West we find a love for nature and
pastoral life. Her poem The Lmd (1926) is saturated wi^ the
spirit of Virgils's Heiogues and is a fine picture of the shepherds
and yeoman, the toilets and workers in the English field. She at
once calls back to our tpind Dyer’s Fleece and Wordsworth’s
nature portiy. “^er interspersed lyrics especially have the purity
and clarity of timeless song,”

Richard Church.

Richard Church worked for ‘honest, unpretentious poetry,
during the twenties. His poems axe about ordinary things and
ordinary people. He has nicely captured everyday scenes and
moods in his Mood Without Measures (1928) and he has proved
that poetry could still live by the ‘simplett sincerity and htcid

( 610 )

actistty? His poems ace about catchiag a bus ot a railway tcain.
He presents^

The joy that never fails

The silent speech with vast creation's God.

Herbert Read.

Herbert Read **ia a terse intellectual poetry of austere
beauty retaining much of his earliest Imagist style, wrote both
satire and metaphysics. He too had come from the war
intent to unravel the twisted years and the twisted white ecstasy
of intellect.**

Hambert Wolfe.

He was a satirist and in New of the Devil (1926) he sati-
rised newspapers with vehemence. He described an encounter
between the Devil and a multiple newspaper proprietor. In
Requiem (1927) he presented the lives of men and women who
fail and succeed in life. He sought **to reach a reconciling
vision in which sinners and saints rest in God*8 sight.
He gave to his theme deep feeling, and much beauty, and
no volume of poems in this decade had a deeper religious
attitude to life.

Roy Campbell.

He was a south African and he excelled in narrative poetry.
His long narrative poem The Flying Terrapin appeared in 1924,
and the work caught popular attention. It is a poem of sea life
and deals with the Terrapin, a sea monster, who stands as a sym*
bol of elemental energy of life. Campbell exhibits himself a
romanticist in this poem. In his Wayzgoose he satirised the
commercial and cultural behaviour of the white people towards
Africans. His Adamaster (1930) beings him out as a lover of
nature in its violent moods. He is the worshipper of strength
and violence and. in his nature poems we have the fierce
intensity of Byron. He admired Nature in her fierce and
callous moods.

( 611 )

Q. 131. Write a note on the itoeiic trends between (1930—
1940) and evaluate the work of the prominent poets of this
period.

Ans. Poetry between (1930—40) was dominated by a set
of poets— Auden, Spendet, Cecil Day Levis and Louis Mackniece*
who made poetry a matter of revolutionary and dynamic think-
ing rather than allowing it dalliance with pastoral beauties. Poetry
until recently had been interested in pastoral life and traditional
heroic ages, but "the material utilized by the characteristic poets
of the nineteen-thirties differs as much from the familiar material
of the pastoral ages as duralumin differs from gold.”’(‘*The poets of
this period were intensely interested in modern lite, and were bent
upon harnessing all phases of modern life and knowledge in their
works. They were interested in politics and were communistic in
their outlook. Many of the groups adopted communism as their
faith. It was rarely in poetry that so open a reference to politics
was made as during this decade. Michael Roberts in his New
Country selection emphasised their political tendency, and their
leanings for the teaching of Karl Marx. They failed' to realise
the dangers of ’political partisanship. “That in the long run their
preoccupation with contemporary liie in its political aspects was
bound to limit their effectiveness as poets they did not realise until
this decade was ended.” Unmindful of their future in the realm
of poetry they went on preaching revolutionary communistic views
foe the regeoecation of the decadent society of their times. "They
were all acutely aware of the deficiencies of the order that has
createi the world in which they most live or die; they abominate
bourgeois society, with its reptessions, creative comforts, and
materialism, they felt that nothing short of a revolution will
bring about a new order, basically communistic, in which living
will be decent and 8elf 'respecting.”t

The poets of this school were considerably influenced in
their technique by Imagist poets. Symbolists of France, and the

The work of these poets is to be found in "New Signatures
(1932)” and "The Pabre Book ot 20th Century Verse (1950)”.
*♦ A. C. Ward ; Twentieth Century Literature,
t Moody-Lovett : A History ol Bnglish Literafure.

( 612 )

tnnoTfttions of Hopkias and T. S. BUot. <‘The Cdontty'

poets need slang, jazzy mettes and imagecy demed fcom tnachi>
necy and boys* stories but theic technique o£ exptession was the
symbolist idiom leacnt fcom Eliot, which was quite incomprehen-
sible to the low bcow.” They employed a language which coaid
not be easily followed by the otdioaty reader. " fheit poetry often
giyes tbe impression of being written in a sort of priyate family
language and uf being addressed rather self-consciously and ezctu-
siyely to the initiated.*' The poets of this school vs an ted poetry to
speak in a new language and new rhythm. They made it mote
intellectual than emotional. But with all theic shortcomings they
brought into poetry a new virility and a ness sense of the contem
potary situation in England. By their revolutionary and dynamic
poetic creed, they took out poetry fcom tbe anaemic state into
which it had fallen during the Georpian period.

The poets of this school had common ideas, and used
common idiom, but they lacked homogeneity. Before the Second
World War the group lapidly disintegrated "Rather, it was seen
never to have been a teal group at all, but only a number of poets
of about the same age and the kind of educational background,
with varying degrees oi talent and very different poetic
personalities.*'

W. H. Auden (1907— )

Auden settled in the United States after the beginning of tbe
Second World War and "has since become a part of the American
literary scene as T. S. Eliot has of the English." Before migrating
to U. S. A., Auden wrote poetry concerning with British life of his
days and concentrated on the "hollowness of the disintegreting
post-war civiliration," as can be seen in the following lines

Cfet there if you can and see the land you once were proud

>ewn.

Though the roads hare almost vanished and the express

never mt.

Smokeless cldmneys, damaged Iwidges, ratting warns and

choked canals.

Thmiines huekledt smashed, tru^ lying on their side

dcrdsS^ty^.

( 613 >

He studkd the life of the common men «nd the social
ptoblems cmftonting him in the post- vat wotld. He was dis-
gutted with anaemic social otdet and advocated violeot social
lefotms fot bringing about a change in society. He wotked for a
tevoltttion on communistic lines (ot the tegenetation of the down-
tcoddeo and misecable masses. Auden shows clearly in his eacly
poetxy a faith in violent social revolution as a means of ushering
in a better social order. He was all fot the ‘proletariat’, and his
sympathies were foe the ‘nnloved’ and the ‘unlucky’. His poetry
became extremely class conscious and was dominated by the
Marxian view of society. He wotked, ‘above ail fot the creation
of a Society in which the real and the living contact between man
and' man, may again become possible’.

Auden soon came under the influence of Freud and his
psychological approach to the ptoblems of human life. He was also,
influenced by the teaching of Homer Lane. He laid emphasis on
"change of heart” fot the betterment of the common people. He
wanted better understanding among the highbrows rather than a
sentimental sympathy for the sick. Fot Auden pity was a sterile
and evil thing. A teal change of heart wks needed for the settle-
meni of human life.

A few poems of Auden are also mystical and metaphysical
in chkracter and are coloured by the thoughts of T. S. Eliot and
the psychologists of the age. In some poems the note of satire
against modern civiliaation is apparent. There is a search fot the
overt and covert enemies.

As an artist and experimentator, Auden showed intellectual
curiosity and picked op ideas, facts and suggestions from several
quarters. He was influenced in his technique by Eliot, Owen,
Hopkins and the French symbolists. "From Eliot came the
symbolic method, the use of modern imagery and of abstract
expression: from Owen the use of assonance, and internal rhyme;
from Hopkids "Sprung Rhythm”, and from both Eliot and
Hopkins the example of severe condensation, at whatever pains to
the reiadfeft,”* .

* Dr. A. S. Collins t English Literatttce of the '20th Century.

( I

“Techoicalljr Aadeo is an actist of gteat Tittaosity, a
ceaseless expeeimeotec in vecse focm, «ith a fine eat fot the tbythm
and music of wotds. Essentially modetn in tone, be has a vide
Tatiety — often he wtites with a noisy jatxiness and gaiety, often
in a cynically satiiical vein, and on no occasion he can be slangily
‘tough.’ But usually he shows a delight in ellipticsil thought and
close packed imageiy, and, if, his pcoletatianism has sometimes
led him into flaws of taste, it has also led him to exploit moie
fully than any one of his ptedecessoxs the riches and rigout of
everyday idiom and vocabulary
Christopher Isherwood (1904— )

The poetry of Ishetwood who wotked togethet with iChden
in the composition of poetical plays, is to be found in Peems
(1930), The Orators (1932), Look Stranger (1936), Another Time
(1940), New Year Letter (1941), For The i ime Being (1945), The
Age of Anxiety (1948), Collected Shorter Poems (1932-1944). He has
presented the social problems of his times in a beautiful mannet.
Stephen Spender (1909— )

The poetry of Stephen Spender is to be found in Poems
(1933-1938), Vienna (1934), The Still Centre (1939), Ruins and
Visions ■{19A:2)t Poems of Dedication (1946), The Edge of Being
(1949), World Within a World (1951).

Stephen Spender, like Auden, was interested in leftist
political views and he pinned his hopes fot the future on left-wing
political theories. Poems (1933), clearly indicated the same Marxist
attitude at that of Auden and Day Lewis. In the poems of this
volume we have the vision of a future world in which death,
despait and decay are to be completely ousted fiom out midst.
The old wotld “where shapes of death haunt human life” must go

and the young comrades must “advance to rebuild, advance to

rebel,” giving up “dreams .of heaven after out wotld.” They

must be governed and dominated by “the palpable and obvious
love of man fot man.” They must wotk for a world in which no
one would die of hunget and “Man shall be man.”

Spendet laid gteat emphasis on the individual. He “always

* jp^^Albett : A Histoly of BngUsh Litetatute.

( 615 )

sttessed^in even the most political of his poems, the impott of social
revolution fot the individual and his values.”* He faced aodpiOMd
the ptoblems of the highly imaginative and sensitive iodiyldaal to
the tensions and uprisings of his times. His main forte lay in the
exploration of the individual consciousness.

His poetry is introspective in character, and in his later
poetry there is a tendency in the poet to look more within himself
lor his subjects. His lyrics give expression to his views about war
sod the ptoblems of the individual in human society. His lyrics,
unlike that of Auden, make an appeal of the heait rather than to
the intellect.

Spender lays stress on the body and is not prepared to
sacrifice the claims of the body at any cost. In his opinion the
value of life lies as much in the body as in the fiery soul. There
must not be only “the following of the spirit” but “The essential
delight to the blood drawn from ageless springs”.

The lover of the body and the senses. Spender, introduced
sensuous imagery in his poetry. He could invest even py Ions with
physical appearance, seeing them “like rude, giant girls”.

Spender was equally interested in writing about the war. He
expressed like Wilfred Owen the pity of war in his poems. “Pity
seems almost an element of Spender's sensuousness, a constant
current in his poetry”. Some of his poems deal with the Spanish
Civil Wat and the poem Two Armies expresses the pity of war.

Spender is “an artist of fine sensibilities and considerable
technical accomplishment,” and his work is widely admired for his
lyricism, sensuous imagery, psychological penetration, introspec-
tive insight, and championship of the individual in the future
world.

Cedi Day Lewis (1904- )

“Cecil Day Lewis gives perhaps the clearest expression to
the' tevoitttionaty doctrines shared by a number oi bis poetic
ftimds— Auden and Spender”. In the early poetry of Day Lewis,
the influence of Auden is clearly perceptible. It appears that the
poet it aping the style of Auden in lines like the following —

Moody-Lovett : A History of Buglisb Literature.

( 6t6 )

Make no mistake, this is where yoU get off
Sue with her suckling, Cyril with his cough.

But with a Mazer and a safety razor.

Day Lewis iaspite of his imitation of Au^ea "was a mose
human poet, in spite of Auden’s insistence oi Idwe and his pctise
of spontaneous living”. In his poetxy we do not come aofoss a
high seatcfa foe knowledge. He does not exhibit "the same teatless
intellect and acquisitiveness of knowledge as Auden’s”. Day Lewis
is essentially the poet of natute, and his love foe natute is clearly
brought out in his lytics and Geotgics. The deep love of England
is teflected in his poems in a mote imptessive mannet than in the
poems of Auden. "Day Lewis was an open-ait poet, above all a
poet of the wind and of bitd-song of everything that shared and
inspired his own nervous vitality”.*

Let us now briefly examine the poetical works of the poet.
Ttnnsitional Poems (1929), a long cycle oi short poems, is
connected with the poet’s own life. Here we come across, "perso-
nal experience in the pursuit of single mindedness”. In the poems
of this volume *'he rejected the conventional technique o£ Tpie
earlier volumes and strove to define his relationship to the social
and pdlitical problems that confronted bis genexation”. The Mag-
netic Mountain (1935) "is his fullest attack upon the shortcomings
and the weaknesses of the old order and bis clear call to revolu-
tionary activity that will bring in the new order of things. The
basic imagery of the poem— the train journey of which the inevit-
able destination is the magnetic mountain of the new society — is
powerfully used, and the poem has brilliant satirical passages in
which the adherents of things as they are mercilessly expose them-
selves” From Feathers to Iron (1931) presents Lewis’s personal im-
pressions of life and is penned in a cleat cut style. In this poem the
poet expresses his thoughts about the child to be born in a few
days. He wishes that hit child should be born in a world of beauty
and should escape the boredom of modern maehanisel life. He
should be reared in the country sorroandiogi fax away front the
hectic life of the city. A Time far Dame (1935) shows a rapid ad-
vance in the poetic style and thought of Ijowis. T^ie mtWt slgnjjfir

: L. ‘.—I. ^ r , 1 , i ll.

* Or. A. S. Collins : English Literature of tho 20th Ceamaf,

( «n )

•Hat poem of this ▼olome is a nattatiye poem desetibiog the epieal
light to Australia ia etock of a plaoe, giving ample evidence,
like Nubara of a yeas ot solates. of the qqalicies and gifts of a
aatrativc popt. Overtures to Death (1938) is cloqdpd by the shadovr
•f war and is a story of Spanish Civil War. “The symbolip
significance of the little Overtures to D^ath suggests that his
eatlier revolutionary idealism had been overshadowed by his
deepening consciousness of the rising threat of a terrific conflict
between the major modern political ideologies”. Since the beginn>
ing of the 1939—45 war the mood of Day I^ewis became sober,
and be made considerable improvement in his technical skill. He
brought out two fine collections World Over All (1943) and Poems
(1943 — 47) consisting largely of personal lyrics. In these poems
Lewis exhibits technical excellence possibly acquired by bis
excellent verse translation of The Georgies of Virgil (1940).

Among the prose works of Lewis A Hope for Poetry
(1934), Poetry For You (1945), The Poetic Image (1947) are
worth study for understanding the poetic trends of the
thirties,

Louis Macneice (1907 — )•

Louis Macneice, the classical scholar, is a poet of repute and
belongs to the Auden group though he has not whole heartedly
supported and embraced the communistic creed. In bis opinion
communism might give the picture of perfection and a perfect
society but the perfection would be maintained “for one day
only”. Macneice was dissatisfied with present day life, and turned
his gajse to the old classical world. He feels frustrated and baffled
in the world of to-day overridden by the forces of materialism
and so he satirises the evil* running rampant in our society, and
to find refuse from the world of machinery and factory towns
in the world of nature and country life. He is opposed to the
inroads of politicians on the personal freedom of the individual
and his poems give expression to bis broad human compassion
and his protest against modern political threats to personal
liberty. Macneice is dissatisfied with present day politics and
“his poem a express a. vigorous reaction to a world which only
impeff^tly adnUnisteyt to his needs and desires*'* He was an

( «18 )

idealist who tealised that ideals cannot be completely achieved,
but who still held to his ideals, which wete those of the humanist,
longing fot a decent possibility of spontaneous living in a wotld
of unassettive individuals”.*

Macneice is gifted with wit and is mostly in high spicits in
his poetxy. It is his witty and humotous way of telling things that
take away the sting out of his poems xevelling in hottoxs of
the wat.

**A putet aitist than Auden, Macneice is actuely awatX of
the musical potentialities of language, and he wsites with a
conttol, finish, lightness of touch, and a stxuctusal sense which ate
often lacking among the membecs of his gtoup, though, on oocas*
ion, he will, fot effect, fall into a looses mannet”. Macneice has
written fine lyrics as well as poems of didacticism, but these is the
lack of a diiving fotce in his didactic poetsy. "Even in his lyrics
a veneex of casualness too often conceals the undetlying
emotions”.

Macneice has done some good wotk in the field of poetic
diama fot bsoadcasting and his The Dark Tower (1946) gained
wide populasity. His ctitical study The Poetry of fF. B. Yeats is a
nice wotk on the Ixish poet and dramatist.

Maoneice's poetsy can be found in Poems (1935), The Earth
Compels (1938), Autumn Journal (1939), Plata and Phantom (1941),
Spring Board (1944), Holes in the Sky (1948), and Collected
Poems (1949).

Q. 132. Clearly bring out the main trends in English poetry
from 1940 to 1966 and write a note on the prominent poets of tids
period.

Ans. Dating (1940—1966) many new experiments have
been made in English poetxy. One significant featate of the poetsy
of this period is the absence of political consiousnesS among the
poets of this age. Stephen in Life and the Poet had pleaded fot
the emetgence of poetxy ftom the field of politics into the pute ait
of att and natuxe. He had declaxed that poetxy most xetotn to the

* A. S. Collins ; English Litexatote of the 20th Centuty.

( 619 )

fandatneotal things of life and must cat off its political mootings.
Poettf of this period is genetally ftee ftom left-wing political
leanings. The political poetiy of the tbitties passed away dating
1940— '60. In place of politics, tomanticism and religion came into
prominence, and the Second World Wat also ioflaenced the
poets of the age.

The Apocalyptic Movement.

The only considerable poetic "movement” of the forties
was the Apocalyptic Movement. It came into prominence at the
beginning oi the Second Wotld Wat. Its main leaders were J. F.
Hendry and Henry Tteece and they edited their Apocalyptic
anthology The White Horseman. In 1946 Henry Tteece brought
oat the manifesto of the new movement in How f See Apocalypse.
The study of this book clearly reveals the aims and objectives of
the new movement. Politically the movement was opposed to
left-wing political theories and stood opposed to the propagation
of political poetry by Auden and his groups. The political posi-
tion of the movement was declared to be, "clearly Anarchic,
an antidote to left-wing Audenism as much as to right-wing Squ-
irearchy.” The movement took in its fold both worlds "that of
objects and that of dreams.” The leaders of the movement G. S.
Fraser and Tom Scott besides J. P. Henry and Henry Tteece were
considerably influenced by the Book of Revelation, Blake,
Shakespeare, Donne, Hopkins and Webster. The movement
was based on an assertion of the individual worth, and an expre-
ssion of the individual perspective of the wotld. "Apocalyptic
writing, then is the art form of the man who can recognise, with-
out feat, the variety and multiplicity of life ; of the man who
acknowledges bis dreams and his laughter, and the tiny and almost
unmentionable things of life, as being real and desirable for
sanity's sake. And the Apocalyptic attitude will teach poetry to
be broad, deep, limitless, like true life. It will teach men to live
mote, and to exist less.” The movement proclaimed its batted
of machinery and a faith in individual vision of the wotld. The
movement set its face against over-intellectual poetry of the
thirties, but many of its members, and notably Fraser, were domi-
sate4 by intellecttitality in their work. The movement did not work

( $20 )

Wtti md Hris sdod given up when the «ini« with it« thiindvtihg
ead tdmbllog tone.

Religions Motement

Religion teceived t spdct dntidg tbit petiotl and thete tVai
a tevival of tellgious poetty in the wotk of Kathleen Rainey
Chcittophet Hatsalj Nocmal Nkholson and David Oascoynej
Dylan< Thomas and Chatles Williams a hnmanist teaches at
OxfoSd. Among these poets Dylan Thonias desetVes special
eonsidetation^ foe he among the poets of the last taro decades
made a vital and substantial conttibutlon to English poetty:

Dylan Thomas ( 1914—53).

Dylan Thomas has been tecognited as the fathec of the necM
tomantic poetty of the fotties and the leadet of the movement
tttiking against ovet-intellectuality in poetty.. He artote sttoogly
emotional poetty full of fetvout and vigoot. His poetty abounds
in vital enetgy and is vividly colourful and musical.. ^'Tbe deptb
and intensity of his passion, his vetbal gifty the technical skill
which undetlles his mettical eipetimeuts all suggest that Dylan
Thomas has the makings of a gteat poet.'*

Dylan Thomas was at heatt a teligious man. fits tision of
life was fundamentally teligiousy and his faith burnt cleatly and
brightly in Dea/A and Entrances. His poetty indeed ^conqheted
Death in Wat time and opened BottaOces to a fullet life.* l7ylan
Thomas believed in immortality and perpetual life in cosmic
eternity. He had the teligious faith of a myjtic Who viewed the
whole nnivetse in a cosmic unity. It was his mission in poetty
'*to embrace the unity of man with natutey of the genetation^
Which each othet, of the divine with the human, of life with
death, to seethe gloty and wonder of it.” Death, could not
(ettify him—

And detdh shall have no daminioH

Dead men naked they shall be one

With the man In the wind and the West niOOn

Though they sink through the sea they shalt rise agaUt

though lovers be lost lave shall nut.

And death tAo/l have no dominiom

( *21 )

it is tbls thought that sttikes the note of ttiumph la
terem^ny oftet a Fire Raid and A Refusal to Mourn the Death by
tire, of a Child ih London. One dies but onte and through that
become^ reunited urith the timeless unity of things. Then where is
the ntcessity of Uioutning. The nature poems of Dylan Thomas
art et]Ually delightful and impressive. In poems Poem in October
and Fern Hill we find the poet feeling happy like a child in the
lap of Nature. In these poems ‘a passionate love of nature linked
to childhood memories^ produced a beauty that touches the heart
and Stirs the SehseS.'

The poems of Dylan Thomas are too closely packed with
metaphor and symbolic poetic imagery. If we fail to grasp his
Symbolism, we lose much charm of his verse. A fait numbei
of Thomas’s earlier poems are obscure because of their metaphor.
Symbolism and imageiy. His attempt to push into the service of
his muse every Biblical, Freudian or folk image, makes him obscure
and difficult of comprehension.

His poetty has appeared in magazines and anthologies. His
main works ate. 18 Poems (1934), 25 Poems (1936), The Map of
Love (193h), Verse and Prose (1939), Deaths and Entrances (1946).
ithe main followers Of Thomas ste Vernon Watkins, Laurie Lee,
and John Heath Stubbs.

The death Of Dylan Thomas in 1953 robbed modern poetry
of a budding and promising poet.

Poetry of the Second World War.

'*The setond world war (1939—45) like the first, inevitably
Stimulated the production of a great mass of poetry, most of
drhich was of merely ephemetal interest. The poetty of the Second
Wotld War tended to express the writer’s pet sonal sense of Separa-
tion ftom what waS familiar and dear, an alert and rather object-
ive recording of the Strange sights and events, he was forced to
^itness^ and a rathet stoical acceptance of whatever fate had in
Store for him.”^ ** Among the themes which . most frequently
recur In the work of the war poets are the boredom and frustr*
atioUs of service life^ the waste that is war; appreciatioo of the
friendship found.in the services, a deep enjoyment of nature and

^ Mobdy-X^ivett : A History of English Literature^

( f22 i

of the landscapes of home, and, above all the coucage £acing*n
to the hardships of the struggle and the possibilties of ultimat
death. The predominant tone is probably one of sadness, an<
there is less of the spirit of knight-errantry than is to be found ii
the poetry of 1914 — 16.”**

The prominent war poets were Alun Lewis (1915—44)
Sidney Keyes (1922 — 43), Keith Douglas (1920—44), Roy Fulle
(1912 — ), Lawrence Durtel (1912 — ) and Alan Rook (1910—)
Their works are significant and deserve appreciation. Alun Lewi
was the author of Raider’s Dawn (1942), Ha ! Ha I Among Th
Trumpets (1945). Sidney Key brought out The Iron Laurc'
(1942) and Collected Poems (1945), Keith Douglas became famou
by his Alamein to Zem-Zem (1946) and Collected Poems (1951)
Roy Fuller gained popularity by The Middle of a War (1942), y
Lost Season (1944), Epitaphs and Occasions (1949).

Women Poets.

The period witnessed notable work from women poets
Among the prominent women poets of 1940-66 were Charlotti
Mew Maty Webb, Sylvia Lyod, Rose Macaulary, Frances Cornford
H..D. and Dorothy Wellesely. "Women have, obviously, their owi
contribution to make to Poetry. In war-time they alone knbv
the separation as felt by wife and mother, however "Modern” am
however intellectual any may be, there is in all a different sensi
tiveness from that of men in their religious and domestic emotions
in general their poetic expression seems to inclioe more t(
clarity, to achieve a subtler and more refined intensity, and t(
preserve a personal integrity apart from the dominating poet»
school of the day.”

CoBCiMiOD.

"There is no lack of activity, in the poetry world of th'
fifties. For almost years after the war it seemed as if Britisl
poetry like Britain herself, was in danger of dying on its feet
Now that has changed, and talent which had been pushing U]
its buds in the little magazines has now begun to flower. Th'
flowers aft not very big yet, and some of them are hybrids

** Dr. A. S. Collins : English Literature of the 20th Cetittiry.

C 623 )

j\xt at least the garden is growing again. There is mote of
promise in the England, of Today than there has been since
the short lived joy of 1945. Let us hope that the next ten years
mav Drove that this country is still capable of such renewal/*

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